On the 22nd and 23rd of May 2025, the ViCom-internal project workshop “Forms and functions of multimodal effort in animal and human communication” took place at Goethe University Frankfurt in a hybrid format. Four ViCom projects were involved in the organization and came together to discuss their perspectives on multimodal effort: Compositional Structures in Chimpanzee Gestural Communication(Federica Amici, Chiara Zulberti), On the FLExibility and Stability of Gesture-speecH Coordination (FLESH): Evidence from Production, Comprehension, and Imitation (Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Šárka Kadavá, Wim Pouw), Processes of Stabilization in Gestures: A Media-specific and Cross-modal Approach (Silva Ladewig) and Co-speech Gestures and Prosody as Multimodal Markers of Information Structure (Frank Kügler, Pilar Prieto, Paula G. Sánchez-Ramón, Alina Gregori).
On the first day, we heard four very insightful and thought-provoking talks by invited speakers that explained their approach to and experience with multimodal effort: Núria Esteve-Gibert (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) gave a talk about acquisition and developmental strategies in children and how linguistic prominence is involved; Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (MIT) presented insights into prosodic and gestural aspects of form in the acoustic and visual signal; Fumihiro Kano (Konstanz University) shared methodological strategies of investigating communicative strategies in non-human animals and Maël Leroux (Université de Rennes) talked about syntactic structures and compositionality in chimpanzee communication.
These talks and short project presentations of each ViCom project provided a great base for three intense discussion sessions on Friday. The discussions were very open, thought provoking and fruitful, especially due to the highly interdisciplinary environment of the workshop. Different perspectives from human and non-human animal researchers, the linguistic domains of prosody and pragmatics as well as the perspective of gesture-speech physics and biomechanics made the discussions diverse. Bringing everyone’s understanding of multimodal effort closer together allowed us to move forward in questions like “How can we define multimodal effort?”, “How can and should we measure multimodal effort?”, “Which concepts and strategies are transferable between human and non-human animal communication?” or “How do we integrate and balance physical, cognitive and communicative effort?”. While we learned a lot from each other, even more questions emerged, showing that more discussion and exchange are necessary.
All participants agreed that bringing together researchers from different fields, with different knowledge and varying experience is not only beneficial for a workshop like this, but also crucial for advancing in multimodal communication research for two reasons: First, looking at the same topic from different angles allows for a more comprehensive understanding of it. Second, exchanging knowledge and skills facilitates the interdisciplinary view on different phenomena. An endeavor like ViCom provides the ideal opportunity for such interdisciplinary environments, as this workshop showed once again!