Utilizing gestures to better understand dynamic structure of human communication
Lei Chen · 2004
Motivation: Many researchers have highlighted the importance of gesture in natural human communication. McNeill [4] puts forward the hypothesis that gesture and speech stem from the same mental process and so tend to be both temporally and semantically related. However in contrast to speech, which surfaces as a linear progression of segments, sounds, and words, gestures appear to be nonlinear, holistic, and imagistic. Gesture adds an important dimension to language understanding due to this property of sharing a common origin with speech while using a very different mechanism for transferring information. Ignoring this information when constructing a model of human communication would limit its potential effectiveness.