Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Research Areas

Details-Events

Multimodal Adaptation to Communicatively Challenging Environments

Speaker James Trujillo
Affiliaton(s) MPI
Date 19.10.2022, 2:30 pm.
Time 14:30 o'clock
Venue Virtual: Please send an e-mail to zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de to get the Zoom invitation link. To be let in, use your proper name.

Abstract

When talking with one another, our communicative environment can sometimes provide challenges: background noise such as other speakers, or even an unclear image during a Zoom call. How do we adapt our communicative signals (e.g., speech acoustics, manual gesture use) when this happens, and what can this tell us about human communication more generally? In this talk, I will present work from two studies that investigated how we adapt both speech and gesture to contextual demands. In the first study, we look at how people adapt their speech and gesture to auditory noise, and how adaptation of the two signals interact with one another. In the second study, we will look at how a blurry image affects speakers during video-mediated interaction. I will discuss the similarities and differences in these types of disruptions, and how this can inform us about communicative adaptation. Furthermore, we will discuss how such studies can inform us about the integrated nature of human multimodal communication.

About James Trujillo

James Trujillo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognition and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. James also received his PhD in Nijmegen in 2019, working on the neural and kinematic dynamics of communicative action and gesture. Now, in the Communication and Social Interaction (CoSI lab) of Judith Holler, his work focuses on how our conversational intentions influence communicative behavior, such as the way that we speak, gesture, and move our bodies while talking. James is particularly interested in using motion tracking and 3D animation to study communicative behavior in novel, more rigorous ways.