Natural Media of Human Communication

This module explores connections among the human mind, language, and other media we naturally use to express ourselves and to understand the people around us. We use spoken language(s) to talk to others and to solve problems, we read our friends’ facial expressions to find out what they might think or feel, we point with our fingers when giving directions, and we are quite good at telling whether somebody is relaxed or agitated from looking at her or his body posture. Users of sign languages recruit their hands, mimics and the space around them to converse, tell elaborate stories, or create poetry.

What is common to all these uses of ‘natural media’ is that no artificial or technical medium is needed to connect and communicate. Human face-to-face interaction is the most natural and fundamental way to communicate, and yet it is a complex mix of finely coordinated bodily movements, speech sounds, mimics, looks, posture, and so forth. It concerns all of us, and understanding the principles – and the beauty – of it, remains one of the big challenges of personal and scientific inquiry. Now, in the era of electronic media, another crucial task is to preserve some of the intuitiveness in technological and virtual environments (e.g., mobile communication, virtual reality games, etc.).

Class presentations and discussions will concern the multimodal nature of language and interaction in various settings. One of the guiding questions is how the different natural media are used in everyday communication, and what the advantages and limits of each medium seem to be. What can gestures do that spoken language cannot do as easily? And what does this tell us about human cognition and behavior? We will gain insights into numerical cognition and in how hearing-impaired and deaf people communicate with sign language. Another central interest is to see how scientists from various disciplines merge their expertise to investigate the forms and functions of natural media in different contexts. For example, what happens in people’s heads when language or motor skills break down due to brain damage? We will also discuss issues in automated speech and sign language recognition. Along the way, students will become familiar with the methods researchers use to examine human communicative behavior, such as audio/video analysis, experimental design, and brain imaging.