Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity link.springer.com/content/pdf/... Can DTW capture gesture form similarity? It seems that it can serve as a useful proxy for gesture form similarity - here a framework for preprocessing motion tracking data & calculating DTW 👍

Here we go! We can finally share what Sharjeel Shaikh @sharjeelshaikh has been leading the work on with us! Consider participating in our detection challenge

@sharjeelshaikh.bsky.social · 3w ago

Gesture Challenge 2026 is open. envisionbox.org/gesture_chal... @babajideowoyele.bsky.social @wimpouw.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @esamghaleb.bsky.social @gdemelo.bsky.social

Really cool thesis by @shoakamine.bsky.social justice came in with the mail. Conversational alignment, critical appraisal of manual/automated annotations, causal inference, what’s not to like?

My good colleagues at CHOP and Emerson are hiring for a project on investigating facial expressions and other non-verbal behavior that can predict conversational success and satisfaction among autistic and non-autistic adolescents. - CHOP postdoc: careers.chop.edu/us/en/job/10... 1/

Research Postdoctoral Fellow - Center for Autism Research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America | Fellows, Students & Interns at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Apply for Research Postdoctoral Fellow - Center for Autism Research job with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Fellows, Students & Interns at...

careers.chop.edu

Visuospatial experience shapes the form of gestures: Blind speakers gesture with more precise spatial tracking of motion than sighted speakers. New paper by @ezgimamus.bsky.social , Mounika Kanakanti, @shoakamine.bsky.social, @asliozyurek.bsky.social. doi.org/10.3758/s134....

Visuospatial experience shapes the form of gestures: Blind speakers gesture with more precise spatial tracking of motion than sighted speakers - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Co-speech gestures emerge from the interaction between visuospatial experience and speech formulation, but what happens when visual experience is absent from birth? Blind individuals gesture in ways consistent with their native language, albeit they gesture less frequently. However, nothing is known about whether their gesture form differs from that of sighted individuals. Using computer vision technologies, this study examines whether gesture kinematics are shaped by visuospatial experience. In an auditory motion-description task, we analyzed spontaneous path-only gestures – depicting motion trajectories – produced by 20 congenitally blind, 21 blindfolded, and 21 sighted Turkish speakers. We assessed the gestures’ alignment with actual motion paths, along with duration and size. Blind participants produced gestures that were more precisely aligned with the motion trajectories, as well as larger and longer. These findings show that altered spatial cognition in blindness enhances gesture precision. The study underscores the role of sensorimotor experience in shaping gesture form.

doi.org

I don’t know why this post doesn’t give his name, but it’s Jo Nagai. This is a true story. medium.com/@zehraanjum2...

How a 10-Year-Old Boy’s Butterfly Experiment Silently Rewrote What We Know About Memory

In the world of science, breakthroughs often come from state-of-the-art labs with million-dollar equipment. But sometimes, they begin in a…

medium.com

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?!!!!@the13thpanther.bsky.social · 3mo ago

check @yngwienielsen.bsky.social 's new (ironic!) piece on conversational alignment: futuresoflanguage.org/posts/librar... "That should capture everything" 😅.

On the Definitive Definition of Conversational Alignment

While some have touted that disagreement fuels the engine of scientific progress, researchers of conversational alignment have always known that having a mutual understanding of words and phrases is n...

futuresoflanguage.org

In our latest paper on how multimodal interaction supports language acquisition, Zhang, Dong et al use head mounted eyetracking technology to demonstrate (!) the role of demonstratives (this/that) in helping children identify the correct referent in a complex visual scene osf.io/preprints/ps...

What is the function of function words ⁉️Using head-mounted eye-tracking and machine learning, we show how tiny words like THIS and THAT actively power word learning 👶🤖. Check our preprint, we’d love to hear your feedback!!!

Caroline Rowland@carorowland.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In our latest paper on how multimodal interaction supports language acquisition, Zhang, Dong et al use head mounted eyetracking technology to demonstrate (!) the role of demonstratives (this/that) in helping children identify the correct referent in a complex visual scene osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you are interested in carrying out a #multimodal experiments with more or less expertise - check this out (authors of the SPP #ViCom) “Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework” is now published and is available at doi.org/10.1177/2515...

Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework - Anastasia Bauer, Patrick C. Trettenbrein, Federica Amici, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Lisa-Marie Krause, Anna K...

Contemporary research on language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to encompass signing, gestures, facial...

doi.org

LingMethodsHub has been in need of some devops TLC for a while, and I finally got around to it! To make sure things are working as intended, I've put together this tutorial on using @vincentab.bsky.social's {marginaleffects} package!

Using {marginaleffects} to understand statistical models – LingMethodsHub

This is a tutorial about how to use the {marginaleffects} package to extract and plot predictions of interest from a statistical model.

lingmethodshub.github.io

My current position will be coming to a close at the end of 2026, so I’m beginning to explore next steps. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at UCL working at the intersection of language, cognition, and multimodal communication. 1/4 👇

Good news everyone 🥳 Our (w @vincentab.bsky.social) primer on models as prediction machines (with the marginaleffects package) is finally officially published!> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients Into Clear Quantities - Julia M. Rohrer, Vincent Arel-Bundock, 2026

Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear model...

journals.sagepub.com

A proofed version of our commentary is now available here pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i... Also, the authors have posted their response to the full set of 25 commentaries bsky.app/profile/kmah...

Kyle Mahowald@kmahowald.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501

Very happy to see this publication out by our great student @shoakamine.bsky.social . This will advance the way we measure whether two mimicing behavior is same or not applied Kinematic measures applied to gesture and validated by hand coding and big data 👏👏👏

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics@mpi-nl.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity. New paper by @shoakamine.bsky.social , @dingemansemark.bsky.social & @asliozyurek.bsky.social doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-02975-5

Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity. New paper by @shoakamine.bsky.social , @dingemansemark.bsky.social & @asliozyurek.bsky.social doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-02975-5

Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity - Behavior Research Methods

Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a well-known algorithm used to assess the similarity between signals of varying lengths. Initially developed for automatic speech recognition, DTW has found applications in psycholinguistics, particularly in analyzing gesture form similarity. An open question in this domain is how effectively DTW captures gesture form similarity. Here, we validate DTW against human annotations of gesture form similarity across two multimodal interaction corpora and explore its utility as an automatic, continuous measure of gesture form similarity. Our findings reveal weak to moderate correlations between DTW distance and the number of similar gesture features – such as handshape, movement, orientation, and position – suggesting that DTW serves as a useful proxy for gesture form similarity. Additionally, we highlight the importance of qualitative analysis of raw data and DTW predictions in enhancing DTW’s predictive accuracy. Our study offers a rigorous validation of DTW as a measure of gesture form similarity and presents a detailed framework for preprocessing motion tracking data and calculating DTW distance. While none of the methods is perfect, the combination of automatic and manual measures provides a comprehensive approach to understanding and measuring gesture form similarity.

doi.org

Link to the paper how one can quantify if two communicative movements are similar or not 👐👐🙌🙌

Prof. Dr. Asli Ozyurek@asliozyurek.bsky.social · 6mo ago

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

📣Congratulations @shoakamine.bsky.social for the great work #BBM!! Quantifying&coming up with objective measures (grounded with human coding) on how we repeat each others communicative movements (visual alignment) is very difficult !! Sho used DTW to do this AND validated with human coding 👇🏼👇🏼

💡New publication💡 In our new paper in Behavior Research Methods, we validated and demonstrated the utility of dynamic time warping (DTW) as an efficient, continuous measure of gesture form similarity. Read the full (open access!) paper here: 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.3...

📦 My first #RStats package on CRAN: {readelan} A package dedicated to reading all files associated with ELAN: eaf, etf, ecv. Reads annotations, metadata, controlled vocabularies. Relevant for many in #linguistics perhaps? More info here: borstell.github.io/misc/readelan/

CRAN Updates@cranupdates.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New on CRAN: readelan (0.1.0). View at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readelan

People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

📌 Curious to know more? Visit my website 👉 lnkd.in/d59v_TpH 📌 Looking for a PhD opportunity? The Spring admissions round at SISSA is now open and I’d be delighted to hear from prospective candidates (deadline: March 20, 1pm CET) 👉 lnkd.in/dvf6RuQd

Our new review paper (w/Anna Kuhlen) is out emphasising the cognitive complexities involved in everyday face-to-face conversation and a call for scaling up traditional psycholinguistic paradigms to better capture these complexities, esp multimodality, addressee responses and multiparty interactions.

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics@mpi-nl.bsky.social · 7mo ago

In this new review in Nature Reviews Psychology our researchers Judith Holler and Anna K. Kuhlen argue that conversation is not simply one person speaking while another listens. It is more like a partnership between minds. www.mpi.nl/news/why-con...

Excited to co-teach Multimodal Minds this June with @anitaslonimska.bsky.social! See below for more information. www.ru.nl/en/education...

Multimodal Minds: Language, Gesture & Sign for Human and Non-Human Interaction | Radboud University

In this summer course, you'll explore how speech, gesture, and sign languages shape meaning and cognition in interaction.

ru.nl

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation. New paper by @judithholler.bsky.social & Anna K. Kuhlen doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00538-1 rdcu.be/e4rlV

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation

Nature Reviews Psychology - Language production and comprehension are often studied as separate processes, but they are intertwined in naturalistic conversation. In this Review, Holler and Kuhlen...

rdcu.be

New open-access paper with @asliozyurek.bsky.social & Emanuela Campisi We extend relevance theory to a multimodal view of language, demonstrating that speakers explicitly highlight iconic gestures as communicatively relevant in knowledge transmission context 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Adults mark the communicative relevance of their gestures more for children than for other adults

According to relevance theory, communication relies on speakers’ ability to signal relevant information, which addressees use to infer meaning efficiently. Most research within the relevance theore...

tandfonline.com

I always thought preschoolers were too egocentric to do well on communication tasks where they had to talk about novel referents. Old papers reported they'd say stuff like "this one looks like my uncle's hat." @vboyce.bsky.social shows that this is wrong! osf.io/preprints/ps...

You can read the full chapter here: Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages | Max Planck Institute share.google/rzwFU9EpdXJb...

Anita Slonimska@anitaslonimska.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Happy to share that my chapter on Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages is finally out! academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

I'm honored to have been awarded an NWO Rubicon grant! ⭐ Later this year, I will be joining the Spoken Language group at the @bcbl.bsky.social. Looking forward to more research on the cognitive mechanisms involved in perceptual learning, with @effiekapnoula.bsky.social and Arthur Samuel 🤩