Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of gesture studies has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, communication, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, primatology, psychology, robotics, sociology and semiotics. This volume presents an overview of the depth and breadth of current research in gesture. Its focus is on the interdisciplinary nature of gesture. The twenty-six chapters included in the volume are divided into six sections or themes: the nature and functions of gesture, first language development and gesture, second language effects on gesture, gesture in the classroom and in problem solving, gesture aspects of discourse and interaction, and gestural analysis of music and dance.

Gestures are now viewed as an integral part of spoken language. But little attention has been paid to the recipients’ cognitive processes of integrating both gesture and speech. How do people understand a speaker’s gestures when inserted into gaps in the flow of speech? What cognitive-semiotic mechanisms allow this integration to occur? And what linguistic and gestural properties do people draw on when construing multimodal meaning? This book offers answers by investigating multimodal utterances in which speech is replaced by gestures. Through fine-grained cognitive-linguistic and cognitive-semiotic analyses of multimodal utterances combined with naturalistic perception experiments, six chapters explore gestures’ potential to realize grammatical notions of nouns and verbs and to integrate with speech by merging into multimodal syntactic constructions. Analyses of speech-replacing gestures and a range of related phenomena compel us to consider gestures as well as spoken and signed language as manifestations of the same conceptual system. An overarching framework is proposed for studying these different modalities together – a multimodal cognitive grammar.

Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of gesture studies has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, communication, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, primatology, psychology, robotics, sociology and semiotics. This volume presents an overview of the depth and breadth of current research in gesture. Its focus is on the interdisciplinary nature of gesture. The twenty-six chapters included in the volume are divided into six sections or themes: the nature and functions of gesture, first language development and gesture, second language effects on gesture, gesture in the classroom and in problem solving, gesture aspects of discourse and interaction, and gestural analysis of music and dance.

Repetitive sequences play a major role as a pattern-building device and are a basic syntagmatic linguistic means on all language levels in spoken and signed languages. Little attention has been paid to investigating them in multimodal language use. Do gestures exhibit different types of repetitive sequences? Do they build complex units based on these types and if so, how is the pattern building to be described? How is the interrelation of gestural and spoken units in such complex units? Is it possible to identify repetitive patterns that are comparable to spoken and signed languages and/or patterns specific to the gestural modality? Based on a corpus-analysis of multimodal usage-events, 7 chapters explore gestural repetitions with regard to their structure, semantic and syntactic relevance for multimodal utterances, and cognitive saliency. Fine-grained cognitive-linguistic analyses of multimodal usage events reveal that gestural repetitions are not only a basic principle of building patterns in spoken and signed languages, but also in gestures. By addressing questions of mediality and multimodality of language-in-use, the book contributes to the investigation of repetition as a fundamental means of sign and meaning construction (crosscutting modalities) and enhances the understanding of the multimodal character of language in use.

Using wireless sensor networks as part of pervasive computing scenarios is a difficult problem. It involves providing functionality and node behavior required by pervasive computing applications given the very limited capabilities and the constraints of wireless sensor nodes. The goal of this work is to investigate the problem of integrating wireless sensor nodes and wireless sensor networks in pervasive computing scenarios and to develop solutions that facilitate such an integration. Based on an analysis of both research areas, of their specific properties and requirements as well as the similarities and differences of the two fields, we identify and discuss a set of five fundamental problem areas that complicate the integration of sensor networks and pervasive computing: communication, network setup and configuration, user experience, security and flexibility and adaptability. In the main part of this work, we then introduce a total of six solution approaches that deal with different aspects of the identified problem areas.

Hüttner and Dalton-Puffer present research demonstrating the tangible benefits of the long-term sustainability of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on participants’ educational outcomes. The chapters outline the argument that the main benefit of CLIL lies in the fact that learners acquire specific literacy practices linked to the curricular subjects they study via the CLIL language and that these go beyond what is commonly learned and studied within a foreign language curriculum. The book provides an orientation as to how such disciplinary literacy or literacies can be conceptualised and understood, and introduces several models that have served to make disciplinary literacies graspable and visible. The various chapters showcase research and development projects from different geographical and educational contexts and therefore elaborate ideas around disciplinary literacies from different vantage points. This book aims at a wide and varied readership, including graduate students studying applied linguistics, foreign language education, and/or teaching methodology; language teachers; content subject teachers with an interest in the linguistic side of their subject; and teacher trainers.

Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak, they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker, often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first to systematically explore the functions of gesture in speaking, thinking, and communicating – focusing on the variety of purposes served for the gesturer as well as for the viewer of gestures. Chapters in this edited volume present a range of diverse perspectives (including neural, cognitive, social, developmental and educational), consider gestural behavior in multiple contexts (conversation, narration, persuasion, intervention, and instruction), and utilize an array of methodological approaches (including both naturalistic and experimental). The book demonstrates that gesture influences how humans develop ideas, express and share those ideas to create community, and engineer innovative solutions to problems.

Abstract: "This paper describes a gesture as an alternative for users to convey their commands to the user interface, and discusses the representations of a gesture and the recognition algorithm. The system integrates gesture commands into direct manipulation, so that issuing a command and manipulating an object can be done in one stroke. The idea of high-level representations of gestures and the algorithm for detecting a circle are our contributions to gesture recognition. The advantage of our representations is that the number of the representations required to represent a gesture is small (2 to 4 for the 26 small letters and the 10 digits), so we can save storage space as well as time for the look-up process. The advantage of our detecting alogrithm is that it is good at handling circular gestures. Since many letters and digits contain a circle-like component when hand written, successful recognition of a circle or near-circle increases the success rate of gestural recognition. The system can be trained by each end user to accept variations for any gesture. The number of samples required is small."