Iconic gestures, and their role in communicating size, number, and time
Friday 14 October 2022, 4:00pm
Online
Speaker: Dr Bodo Winter, University of Birmingham
About Dr Bodo Winter: Bodo Winter is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language & Cognition. His research focuses on iconicity, multimodal communication, and numerical cognition.
Abstract:
In this talk, I will give an overview of work from our lab that looks specifically at iconic gestures. I will discuss three sets of studies. First, a series of experiments which investigate the cognitive mechanisms that underpin our understanding of iconic gestures for size and shape (Hassemer & Winter, 2016, 2018). Second, an observational study looking at how different types of size gestures can be used to metaphorically communicate numerical magnitude in the TV news (Woodin et al., 2020). Third, a series of experiments which demonstrates that iconic gestures of time concepts are only successfully understood if the linguistic and social conditions are just right (Winter & Duffy, 2020). I will conclude with an outlook on future and ongoing work.
