To celebrate national Men’s Health Week from 13-19 June, the Wellbeing team are running a competition to win a wellness prize. It’s all about appreciating the men in our lives - find out how to enter and see how men can give themselves a health MOTLink opens in a new window.

Brought to you by the WIHEA ESD learning circle, the Challenge will see staff and students co-creating possible solution to a real environmental challenge in Coventry, using a more holistic approach to sustainability in HE. The Challenge will engage participants in two 3-hour workshops on 13th and 15th June 2022, 2-5pm, plus a 1-hour optional drop in support session.

The workshops are designed to facilitate a collaborative approach to reframing a challenge, and will coach you to help explore it in an innovative way. After the workshops, the Challenge will last for additional 10 days (two weeks in total). With the help of expert student and staff coaches, you will continue collaborating asynchronously and by the end of two weeks will submit your solutions either in the form of an e-poster or a presentation, and a video.

All staff and students (UG and PG) are welcome. Register by 5 JuneLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window to secure your or your team’s place and be in with a chance to win a first place prize of £400*! The winning idea will also be considered for implementation by the University and/or Coventry City Council.

*Please note that the prize winnings can only be awarded to the student participants.

Organised by: Marta Wesierska

Email for teams link: marta.wesierska@warwick.ac.uk

I'd like to invite you to the last Language and Learning seminar this term which will take place next Wednesday, on the 15th of June, at 12-1 on Microsoft Teams.

Jiahao Yang will be giving a talk titled Hearing speakers produce silent gestures that facilitate efficient communication (abstract below).

I hope to see many of you next week. Best wishes, Marta ------------------

Abstract:

Silent gesture is gesture-based communication system created by hearing speakers when communicating exclusively in manual modality. Hearing speakers often face multiple choices as to how to structure their intended meaning into silent gestures (e.g., performing the action of eating an apple or tracing the outline of an apple to represent “apple”). However, previous studies have demonstrated systematic iconicity in silent gesture. To express a given concept, hearing speakers reliably employed a specific gesture with a subtype of iconicity (e.g., a two-handed eating gesture for the concept “sandwich”). This preference for a specific subtype of iconicity is found to be cross-culturally robust, suggesting that it can provide insight into universal principles that guide human communication in the absence of pre-established form-meaning mapping. In this talk, I will focus on communicative efficiency as a factor that shapes silent gesture. We argue that silent gesture is fundamentally usage-based and is designed to achieve efficient communication. To test this, we measured the communicative efficiency of gestures that are produced for a target concept at varying frequencies. We found that comprehenders are more likely to provide interpretations that are shared across comprehnders and highly semantically related to the target word when interpreting a most frequently produced gesture than a less frequently produced gesture. This result indicated that silent gesture is efficient for comprehenders. Ongoing related experiments will also be presented, which investigate efficiency for both producers and comprehenders. These experiments help clarify the possible factors that shape human communication in the absence of pre-established form-meaning mapping.