Empty-handed or free gestures

One can differentiate among the intransitive or semiotic gestures according to their properties. One of these properties is the presence of speech as a comparison parameter:

• The presence of speech


Kendon (1988) (from [7] classifies intransitive gestures along a continuum that goes from gesticulation to sign languages, according to the presence of speech:

• Gesticulation: idiosyncratic spontaneous movements of the hands and arms during speech.
• "Language-like" gestures: like gesticulation, but grammatically integrated in the utterance.
• Pantomime: gestures without speech used to communicate a story.
• Emblems: insult and praise gestures.
• Sign Language: a set of gestures and postures that form a complete linguistic communication system.
If one moves from gesticulation to sign language in a continuum:
{the obligatory presence of speech declines;{the presence of language properties increase;{gestures tend to be more socially regulated as opposed to idiosyncratic. [7]
 
 

These properties can be very useful in designing gestural acquisition systems. Let's analyse two examples:

If one wants to make an acquisition system for sign language gestures, it may be important to provide the recognition system with grammars (or linguistic properties) of the gestures to be captured. These can be patterns associated to each gesture (since they are likely to be known beforehand, to a certain degree "speaker" independent), rules about sequence of gestures, etc., since these gestures are well defined and have their own language properties.

If one wants to acquire gesticulation gestures, the above procedure will not apply, since these gestures don't present language properties (at least in the same extent as sign language gestures), are likely to be simultaneous to speech and are culture and "speaker" dependent (idiosyncratic). One could think about trying to extract some information from the speech concurrently to the gestural acquisition in order to profit from the complementary function of these gestures to speech.

NB. some other classifications can be found in [7], [11] and [8] (the last for the case of conductor's gestures).

Wed Feb 10 10:07:20 MET 1999