Herbert Clark

Stanford University
 
Talk title: “On Timing Gestures”
 
Herbert H. Clark is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is author of several books on language use, including Psychology and Language (with Eve V. Clark), Arenas of Language Use, and Using Language. He is also author of over a hundred journal articles and chapters in both psychology and linguistics. His research has focused on how people use language, especially in everyday conversation. Clark was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received a life-time achievement award from the Society for Text and Discourse, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel.
 

Susan Wagner Cook

University of Iowa
 
Talk title: “Space and Time on Our Hands: How Gesture Influences Communication and Learning”
 
Susan Wagner Cook’s research explores human communication and cognition, with a particular focus on how children and adults express and incorporate information using both speech and gesture. Her research suggests that hand gesture can have a variety of effects on speakers and listeners, not only facilitating their communication, but also influencing learning and memory. In ongoing work, she is exploring how the mind, the body and the environment interact in support of communication and learning. The overarching thread uniting all of this work is how people express their thoughts in their hand movements in conjunction with speech, how others extract this information, and the implications for ongoing cognition and learning over time. To this end, she does studies with both children and adults, integrating across cognitive and developmental perspectives.
 

Marjorie H. Goodwin

UCLA
 
Talk title: “Intertwining Bodies to Accomplish Co-operative Sociality”
 
Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Her books, He-Said-She-Said and The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion investigate how talk is used to build social organization, with particular emphasis on the social worlds of young girls. Her work also focuses on many different facets of the organization of bodies interacting with other bodies, including touch, gesture, prosody, and emotion.
 

Marianne Gullberg

Lund University
 
Talk title: “Why gestures are not (only) a compensatory device – evidence from language learners”
 
Marianne Gullberg’s research is multidisciplinary and multimodal. She studies adult second language (L2) acquisition and use, L2/bilingual processing, and gesture production and comprehension in acquisition using a range of techniques including eye-tracking, ERPs, and more traditional behavioral methods. She is interested in the human language learning capacity, in how the representations of a new language develop and co-exist with the representations of other languages in the minds and brains of individuals, and in the multimodal expression of language in real time. Gesture analysis is used as a tool to probe these issues further, but gestures are also studied in a perspective of cross-modal information processing. Between 2003-2008, she headed the group The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands (with Prof. P. Indefrey). She is also co-founder of the Nijmegen Gesture Centre (with Prof. A. Özyurek).
 

Asli Özyürek

MPI Nijmegen and Radboud University
 
Talk title: “Visible communicative acts in gesture, sign, and the brain”
 
Asli Ozyurek has a joint PhD in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of Chicago. She is currently a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and research fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Center for Brain, Cognition and Behavior. She investigates to what extent our knowledge and use of bodily actions interact with language, its processing, and use in communication. She focuses on two domains of human communicative behavior in which body and language are closely related:
 

• gestures that speakers use spontaneously
• sign languages (established or emerging) used by deaf people

 
She uses an interdisciplinary approach (linguistic and psychological) and a combination of methods and techniques such as linguistic analysis, comparative (developmental, cross-linguistic) and experimental methods as well as brain imaging (ERP, fMRI).
 

Andy Wilson

Microsoft Research
 
Talk title: “Interacting in Spatial Augmented Reality”
 
Andy Wilson is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His work is focused on applying sensing techniques to enable new styles of human-computer interaction. Today that means multi-touch and gesture-based interfaces, display technologies, depth cameras and so-called “natural” interfaces. In 2002 he helped found the Surface Computing group at Microsoft. He manages the Natural Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft, he obtained his BA at Cornell University, and MS and PhD at the MIT Media Laboratory.