gestures and spoken language

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120508152000.htm

Among their key findings is that gestures -- more than actions -- appear to make people pay attention to the acoustics of speech. When we see a gesture, our auditory system expects to also hear speech. But this is not what the researchers found in the case of manual actions on objects.




http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100105143730.htm

The results revealed that the volunteers performed better during congruent trials than incongruent trials -- they were faster and more accurate when the gesture matched the spoken word. Furthermore, these results were replicated when the volunteers were told to pay attention only to the spoken word and not the gesture. Taken together, these findings suggest that when gesture and speech convey the same information, they are easier to understand than when they convey different information.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070725105957.htm

Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned.


D - (God I hate this ever changing font stuff. Gotta learn HTML!!!)


D - I move my finger along under the story book line I'm reading with my nieces. I also indicate objects or actions in the picture being referred to.


http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105474698565893

D - sign language can be distinguished from other hand movements by a predictable hertz rate of movement.

Information-transfer (IT) rates in bits/sec were estimated for a variety of methods of human communication and modalities of reception. Using previously published data, a range of communication rates for which transmission is highly accurate was established for each method and modality. These communication rates were converted into a normalized unit of transmission (words/sec). The normalized units were then converted into estimates of IT rate (bits/sec) using Shannon's (1951) calculations of the information content of a single letter of the alphabet. Maximal estimates of IT rates of roughly 40 to 60 bits/sec are observed for speech (through audition) and for reading and sign language (through vision). Maximal rates roughly 50 percent lower are obtained for reading through the tactual sense.


D - I hope to exceed this data transmission rate in my tonal VERSE scheme. The musical tone in VERSE replaces all closed class function words. Stripped of tone, a sentence is often just Subject Verb Object.
Were I to ever combine this approach with my CVN / Decimese vocabulary, with a 1:1 phoneme/ morpheme relationship, this could result in a very dense data transmission rate per second.