How gestures and other non-verbal cues facilitate comprehension - Xaver Funk | PGO 2021

Hello everyone, and a warm welcome to
Multimodal Language Processing.

My name is Xaver Funk, and I recently had
the chance to really [involve] myself into

this topic, because I am studying
neurosciences and this was kind of

something that I had to do. And, yeah,
that's what I want to share with you today.

So, what I have been doing recently also,
is learning arabic, and a little bit of

mongolian. And mostly what I did was,
I had this stream of auditory signals

that maybe came from the ASML audio, and
I tried to match those to symbols that

were representing these, right, in the
book.

And I kind of had this feeling that this
is incomplete.

So there is something missing there.

And while I was on the other hand,
studying a lot about multimodal language

processing, which I how gestures influence
processing and stuff like that.

I came to the conclusion that, yeah, there
is something missing.

In our world today, we are all litterate
so we mostly think of languages as

these auditory signals, these mouth noises
and the symbols that represent these.

But there is so much more going on, in
face to face communication and, yeah,

I want to make this point clear, with a
virtual experiment.

So, I want to invite you to first of all,
listen to this audio excerpt, from an

"Easy Languages" video. And I give you the
subtitles here, with the english

translation as well. So, basically, these
are auditory signals in Dutch,

and sequences of symbols
in Dutch and English.

And for the people learning Dutch, please
just ignore the English, just to make it

a little bit harder. And people who know
Dutch, please close your eyes, so that

you don't see it at all.
So, let's go.

So, when I was listening to this at first,
I was - because I know some Dutch,

I was understanding quite a lot,
but, kind of, not everything.

And then, I watched the video that goes
with it, it was kind of a different experience.

And that's what we are going to do now.
So just watch the video, and if you can,

see how these two women, that are
interviewed here, are interacting

with the interviewer, and
between each other.

So, I hoped this worked, and you felt
a little bit different now.

And even for the people who don't know
Dutch, I hope you could kind of follow

what was going on. And even if you
didn't, the point I want to make is that

messages are not only auditory,
they are always also visual.

We have a lot of non-auditory
articulators, like 43 face muscles

for example, and then 2x 34 muscles
in the hands, and then even more in

the arms, in our torso.
And the people in this video

really knew how to use these.
So for example we had a lot of

facial movement going on,
like you see on the top, here.

See how she raise her eyebrows,
and then, you have this head tilting

at the end, that really put
an emphasis on what she's saying.

And then there is a lot of gaze switching
as well.That's right in the begining,

when she says
(Dutch): Oh genoeg ! Heb je even ?

So, "Oh, there is so much that
I want to see! Do you have some time?"

But, she doesn't really say "time", she
says "Heb je even", "Do you have a little"

And for me, when I was only listening,
I didn't quite get what she was saying,

but when I saw how she adresses
the interviewer, I kind of got it,

afterwards.

So then there is of course manual gestures
like "hoop op mijn list",

that's that one here, "hoop op mijn list".
She says "berglandschap", so that's

a mountain range, and then "lang geleden"
"long time ago", right?

So there is a lot of messages that are
supported with these manual gestures.

Then there is also stuff like this
nose scratching, where we don't even know

is there something to it, or is it just
a nose scratching.

Does it carry some information?
We don't know.

And then, lastly also arm and torso
movements.

And also if you watch at the top here,
you have nodding. So you see how

these two kind of nod together, they
really give us the impression of

how good friends they are, right.
And then if you look at this bottom part

here, that's my favorite part of the
video. You really have this complex

orchestration of different gestures,
and they are turn-taking.

So, the one on the right says something,
and the one on the left answers that

perfectly, and then you have gestures,
and then the, putting their hair back,

right, so there is so much going on
between them, and it really gives more

than just the auditory message, right.

So, note that there is something that
our brain has to achieve here.

Mainly two things : so, it has to
segregate all of the stuff that is not

important for the message.
That's the segregation problem.

From the important stuff, and then,
take all the important stuff, all

the auditory and visuals information and
put it together into a coherent message.

That's our binding problem.
And all of this, note, all of this is

under a really tight time constraint,
when you're turn taking, when you're

having a conversation.
And if you say something and

the other person say something,
and there is not that much time

between turns. And if you need
more time, then that also has

a meaning, right ? If you take time, then
that means that you're hesitating

to answer, maybe there is something
going on with you emotionally...

So you don't want to have that as well.
So, yeah, so basically, this is really

a huge computational problem
for your brain.

And well, how did your brain do?
Did you feel the video was more difficult

than the audio ? Did you understand more,
or did you understand less?

Did you feel more in the scene, maybe?
Catching more informations between the lines?

And well, for me, at least as you might
guess, for me it was way easier

to follow with the video to interpret
these gestures. And this is kind of

a paradox. So, how come that processing
more signals simultaneously is easier

that processing speech alone?
And this also was shown

in the litterature, so people have made
experience with this.

And this is really a surprising
facilitation. For example, there are

lot of studies, I'll just give you
one example.

So in this study they showed people
a "prime", so this was some video

of an action that somebody did, and then
they showed the people different videos.

And the videos were either completely
congruent, so what was said was the same

as the gesture, and was the same as
this prime. So in that case it would be

"chop" and doing the chopping gesture.
And then there were different conditions

where either the speech was congruent,
incongruent, and the gesture was congruent.

Or the speech was incongruent and
the gesture was congruent.

And then they had also weakly congruent
stuff, like, this for "chopping",

but this is actually cutting so this is
only weakly incongruent.

And then this twisting, which is
strongly incongruent.

And then people had to press a button
for "yes" if either the speech or

the gesture were related to the prime,
and no if neither speech nor gesture

was related to the prime.
And what the people found out was that

there were differences in response times,
and also in the proportion of errors

that people did, as soon as soon as
there were something incongruent.

And from that the authors come to
the conclusion that really, speech and

gestures are two sides of the
same coin, they mutually interact

to enhance comprehension.
And now the big question is, of course,

how does our brain achieve this surprising
facilitation?

And we can look back at turn-taking,
to maybe get some clues here.

So on average a turn-take takes only
about 0 to 200 miliseconds, which is

a fifth of a second. You can see in this
video how fast she is responding,

right now, after this, like, this is
an instant, right?

And this is quite extraordinary, because
producing a single word actually takes

about 600 miliseconds.

So if I just prompt you to say a word,
you would take 600 miliseconds to say it.

So there's something going on, it seems
like we are predicting already what we are

going to say before the turn of the other
person is finished, and we already prepare

our turn.

So there is something that is going on,
that has to do with prediction.

Most language use in conversation
has to be based on prediction somehow.

And this is quite nice, because prediction
is anyways the current hype

in neuroscience nowadays, and it's
basically a good candidate for

the overarching function of the brain.

And many people think that what we are
doing in our daily lives is basically

constantly computing and updating
probability distributions.

And this applies both to action,
to perception, and also to language.

So, this will be a rephrasing of
the problem we had before,

as a prediction problem.
And this become then,

"given the preceding context - so, given
all the words that come before - what word

is most likely to come up next?"
Right? And to make this more clear,

let me give you a quick example:
so, imagine I come to you and I say,

without anymore context "I would like to".

And then, you don't know what I'm going
to say next, right?

It could be any of these, for example.
I would like to drink, eat, work...

And so on.
And now, if I shape my hand

in the form of a "C", and I put it to
my mouth, like this, while I say

"I would like to", then your probability
distribution over these words changes

in such a way that "drink" is much more
likely to be the next word.

And maybe "eat" also a little bit, but
the others words probably not,

because, you can associate this
gesture with drinking, or a little bit

with eating, because it's also
something that you put to your mouth,

but mostly this is commonly understood
as "drinking", right.

So, in this way gestures add context to
predictions and help this process of

predicting, and that also helps the
comprehension.

And, we can actually measure prediction,
using neurophysiology.

So this is EEG, and "EEG" stands for
"Electro Encephalography", and

it's basically putting electrodes on the
scalp, and then measuring

the brain activity that's below.
If you do this, well you can measure

brain activity basically.
What people usually do, is that

they give people these sentences.
So these could be normal sentences,

like this one : "It was his first day
at work."

Or it could be so-called garden-path
sentences. So these are sentences that are

somehow manipulated artificially
to elicit some response. Right?

So this would be : "He spread the warm
bread with socks."

So you may have a weird feeling on
your head, because nobody spreads

the bread with socks. And this weird
feeling, if we would measure you with

an EEG, would constitute this reaction
here, that's a so-called N400.

"N" because it is a negative polarity,
and it's 400 miliseconds after the word.

So, all of this above here is just
electrical activity, right? And you have

this really pronounced peak, when
there is a violation of the semantics,

like with "socks".
And it's also taken to be a prediction

error. So you did not predict socks,
you predicted Nutella, for example,

or honey. But not socks. And this is
reflected in this N400 prediction error.

So people are doing this a lot, like, showing
these sentences that are somehow manipulated.

We have another example here, this is
another topic : if you write in all caps

you have this kind of response for
example.

But, what I want to do now with you
is bringing you more to the cutting edge

of what is currently done in multimodal
processing research.

So the trend is to go away from these
artificially constructed sentences, and

more towards naturalistic language
comprehension. So, using actual stories,

actual sentences, that are not manipulated
in any way. And this will be combined with

computational linguistics - how that
works, you will see in a bit.

And also, yeah, with that you can look at
multimodal processing if you just add

a video to the audio that
you make people listen to.

And what it might look like
is like this. So, this is one study

that is currently not published
officially yet. It is already on

the archive. And I want to use this to
illustrate to you how we might research

naturalistic language comprehension.
So the general planners get some

per-word measures - so these would be
these ones here. So for each word,

there is some value attached.
And then we can use these as regressors

in the big linear regression model.
So, using fancy statistics, and with that

we're basically asking our data "how well
are you predicted by these regressors?"

And for example, this one here is
surprise and this is closely related

to predictions or prediction errors.
So this is the negative log probability

of a word, given all of the words
that come before it.

So, this is the contexte, basically,
and this is some word, "w".

So this is basically telling you how
unpredictable is a given word.

And this measure is base on computational
language models, so for example,

they would take the whole corpus of
a language, and then, see which words

occurs after each other, and thereby get
to this value of how unpredictable it is.

And then, they have another thing here.
They use the fundamental frequency of each

word as a pitch indicator, to control
for prosody, which is also pretty cool.

So they let loose their linear
regression models, with these predictors,

so they have a surprisal value for each
word, for example, a prosody, ready for

each word, then they indicate where
there are meaningful gestures happening,

and, yeah, also, mouth movements.

And, what came out of this, one finding
that might be interesting for us,

now, is that for meaningful gestures,
the N400 is less negative.

So you can also see this here : for
meaningful gesture, this blue line,

you see that it is a lot less negative
than the red line where the gestures are

absent. And then there's also, that's why
I told you about surprisal, an interesting

interaction between gestures and
surprisal. So, the higher the surprisal,

the less unexpected a word, the stronger
this facilitating effect of gestures is.

Which is also really interesting.
Then there's, this is a similar study,

that I actually got the chance to work on,
with a colleague.

So what we did here, we had a measure of
entropy. This measures basically the

uncertainty about the next word.
So if you think back to the example

we had before, where I was telling
you "I would like to", and then something,

but without context, that would be really
high entropy, really high uncertainty :

you don't know what's coming next. Right?
Then we also had surprisal, we had word

frequency, how often the word came up.
And IVC is a measure of,

it's an abbreviation for "instantaneous
visual change", so, how much the actor

moved while we were showing this to
the people. And then speech envelope,

this is basically a measure of the level
of the sound.

And what we found is - and this
by the way was an FRMI experiment,

so we can look at wich regions are active
during some condition.

And for words where the surprisal was
really high, there were these regions

in red active, and for words where
entropy was really high,

these regions in blue. And now if
we look at interactions with gestures

for the entropy condition, we can see that
when there were gestures present, we had

really specific activations compared
to when there were no gestures present,

in situations where there is high
entropy, so high uncertainty.

So with these tools we try to get into
the processes that underlie prediction

in language.
So let's take a step back, and have a look

at kind of a more global
evolutionnary perspective.

We know from primate research that gesture
and gaze are crucial for communication.

You can see it in this video : this ape
right here does this gesture,

and this signals to its mother
to pick her up. Right?

So these are bonobos, and you can see
right now, this "pick me up" gesture.

And Federico Rossano, from the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionnary Institute,

could show that this gesture get more
and more ritualized, to the point where

it becomes only a small wrist bend with
the arm and one gaze, to instantiate

this carry behavior. Right?
So you see that there is also kind of

a prediction involved : the mother has
to predict what the child is wanting

to do, right?
Going from this, to only this.

Then, building on this, there are some
authors that propose that speech and

gesture have a common origin.
And the idea here is that, through

these ritualized gestures that
we've just seen in those bonobos,

after a time there will be a proto
sign language evolving.

Which then at some point will be
accompanied by sound as well,

evolving into a proto speech language.
And then the proto sign, the proto speech,

will reinforce each other more and more,
until language emerges.

And another point, here,
or an observation : those of you who have

tried sign language, it kind of feel
surprinsingly natural, right?

So, if speech is the true communication
medium for humans, why is it

thet sign language feels so real,
so natural, right?

And then another point that goes into this
theory is that voluntary hand movements

came before voluntary breathing. And you
need voluntary breathing to articulate

yourself, right?

So, also, just as complementary to speech,

you can more easily show spatial
relations between things.

And then, if you look at child development
the same pattern : gesture develop

before speech, and pre-speech turn-taking
is faster than later.

So if you're a baby and you gesture,
the turn-taking with your mother,

the communication is quite fast,
it's almost adult level turn-taking.

Then as you learn language it gets way
slower, and only in middle-school it gets

gets back to the adult level turn-taking.

So, what's the point, right? What does all
of this mean for language learning?

So for this, let's do another
time-travel, back to 1768,

and meet this French Jesuit monk :
Claude-François Lizarde de Radonvilliers.

And he wrote this book :
(French) "About The Way To Learn Languages"

back in the day, where he reflected on how
we should teach people languages.

And interestingly, this is basically
the grandfather of the Assimil method,

and also the Méthode
Toussaint-Langenscheidt, or, also called

"interlinearversion". So this would be
this sheet here.

This was a way people learned languages
at the turn of the previous century.

And you can see here that you have
the spanish at the top, then some

consideration in the middle,
and on the bottom the german.

And this is kind of similar to what
Assimil does, right?

So this is really interesting,
but that's not the point here.

What he also did in this book is to compare
L1 - so first language acquisition -

with second language learning.
And he noted that it seems that,

for the first language, parents show their
children pictures, and enact words or

concepts, and encourage the children to do
the same, like this little boy does here.

But for second language acquisition all we
do is give people these vocabulary lists,

and expect them to learn it
just like that.

So this is kind of an interesting point,
and since then it has been shown,

- and this is actually pretty robust,
I was really surprised, that it has been

a really robust finding, that gesture
enriched material enhances learning.

So in this study, for example, people
tried to teach english-speaking people

japanese words, and they had four
different training conditions.

So one, only speech, one repeated speech,
one speech plus incongruent gestures

- so gestures that would not match -
and then, congruent gestures.

And this is the interesting condition,
right?

And then they tested the people after
encoding for three different times :

after five minutes, after two days,
and after one week.

And also they tested them on forced choice
so it's basically multiple choice,

and free recall, so it's prompting
the people with the word, and then they

come up themselves with the answer.
So these numbers here are basically

the proportion of correct
answers that people give.

And you can see that,
across the board,

the speech plus congruent
gesture condition is

very superior compared to the other ones,
which is, yeah, which is interesting, and

so, you would maybe think that the point
is "okay, so we just use videos instead

of audios", right?
And this is what I would call

Multisensory enrichment.
And there is nothing wrong with this,

this is really useful, you have
these YouTube channel like Easy Languages

- I'm not sponsored by the way (laugh) -
where you have conversations with

real people that from time to time
make gestures, and you get the full

conversation thing, right?
And you have these one-on-one videos,

like this one from Mandarin Corner.
Where they are also a lot of gestures

involved, so the host, Eileen, really
tries to integrate a lot of gestures.

But this is actually not the point
- I mean, this is cool but I think

you already do that.
The point is way deeper.

So, there's another thing going on,
not only when you watch gestures,

but when you enact them.
This is called the enactment effect.

This was actually coined in 1980,
by two germans.

They called it first the "Tu-Effekt",
which translates literally to "Do-Effect".

And you can see why people chose to call
it the enactment effect, because it sounds

way more fancy (laugh) but I really like
the "tu-effekt", it sounds funny.

Anyways, the point is that action words
or phrases, this is what they - Engelkamp

et Krumnacker - noticed : that action
words and phrases are remembered better

if they're acted out,
or accompanied by gestures.

So if you would learn the phrase
"chopping garlic", then if you enact it

actually while learning it,
you will retain it way better.

And this effect is also
really well replicated,

and this was also
really surprising to me,

because it is virtually not at all
translated into actual teaching.

Nobody does this, nobody tells
the students to enact things, right?

Enact words, enact anything.

And it has been well replicated
across tasks, across materials and also

across populations : across children,
adults, even clinical populations :

People with Alzheimer, people recovering
from stroke...

Somehow people made them
learn words and then act the words,

and it worked better
than without enactment.

And also, this is not only true for
action words and concrete words,

but also abstract words.
Anything you can somehow find

a representation - with gestures - for,
you can use this enactment effect.

And this is way more powerful than
multysensory enrichment,

and we can call this
"sensorimotor enrichment",

because you use
your senses and your "motor".

So, this is also, this ties in with
another really interesting development

in neurosciences, called
"embodied cognition".

Basically this is the idea that many
features of cognition - and these might be

concepts, categories, reasoning or
judgement - are shaped by aspects

of the body. And this would be
the motor system - so how we move -

the perceptual system - what we see, what
we feel, what we hear, and so on.

And also bodily interactions with
the environment.

And you might see where I get with this,
if you think about concepts and categories

What are words, if not concepts and
categories, right?

So we might ask the question, "how are
words represented in the brain?"

And there is this really funny study,

they showed people words that had strong
olfactory associations, which means

they either stink really hard, or
they smell really well.

And, in case you're looking for some
inspiration for your spanish poem,

you can go (laugh) to this publication and
search through the list of words.

This is also a small - this is only
a small sample, there are tons of

really strong smelling words
in the study and, yeah.

So basically, what they found is that
when they showed people these words,

as compared to words that did not smell
that much, some regions in the brain

that are associated with olfaction,
so, with smelling, lighted up.

And this kind of has been
extended as well to actions.

So, on the left here, these are
all the regions that light up

when you move your foot
when you move your fingers,

or when you move your tongue.
And on the right here, these are

the regions that light up when you read
leg-related words, arm-related words,

or face-related words.
And you can see that, this more or less,

this is more or less,
these activations fit each other, right?

So, in some way, leg-related words
are stored where you also move you leg,

arm-related words are stored where
you also move your arms, and so on.

So, we can think about words actually
as functional networks, like this.

And, note that words are
experience-dependent functional networks.

And experience is connected
to the body, right?

So for exemple, you surely have, not only
read and heard the word "garlic",

you also have smelled garlic,
you touched garlic, you tasted garlic

and, really important thing
you chopped garlic.

So when you read "garlic",
you not only have

the core language areas - in yellow here -
activated, but also

subcortical olfactory areas, and some
gustatory areas - so, for taste -

action areas, right, and visual areas
as well.

So, what I want to tell you here,
think about this when you learn languages.

Did you do the same for "knoblauch", for
example - the german word for "garlic"?

If you learn german, do you actually
get into this huge associated network?

So, and that's the point basically,
we are coming to the end,

the point is that language is multimodal,
you should use sensory-motor enrichment

when learning languages, and thereby
embody your languages.

And if you want to learn more about this,
and also for me to give credit,

this is basically where I got most
of my input from.

These are four big review articles that
discuss all of this stuff.

So yeah, that's basically it.
Thanks for listening, and hoping for some cool questions.

I would most certainly guess so.
This thing with the phone is also

something that I have
experienced quite a lot.

I have lived in Chile for some time,
and I've got myself a chilean SIM-card

And I didn't give this number to a lot
of people, but somehow, this number got

to people that were, I don't know,
trying to sell me something.

And I would get a call from
somebody, pick up the phone,

and I would not understand
a single word.

Like, Chilean spanish is already
really hard, and then it's completely

out of context, I don't know what
this person wants from me, and then

it's just [gestures] and I'm like
"sorry, I don't understand you"

"I don't understand you",
"I don't understand you",

over and over again.

And yeah, I mean, if you're on the phone,

there's also a little bit of noise maybe,

and I really have the feeling that
that makes,

especially in a foreign language,

conversing that much harder, because
you don't see the mouth movements,

it's not that clear of a sound,
you don't see anything else, and yeah.

I would say so.
Cool question.

I would guess so, I would guess so.
Like, I mean,

especially for autistic people
there is a lot of research

on language processing in general,

but I don't know of any studies that are

specifically for multimodal processing,

but I think there are quite a few.

Actually the experiment that I showed you,

the one that I worked on, as well,
in the middle of the presentation,

the entropy stuff, we also did this
with schizophrenic patients,

but we have not looked at the data yet.

So once this publication is done then,

somebody else will deal with

the clinical data,
with the schizophrenic people,

and in general for schizophrenics there's,

there's a lot of,

like, language-related abnormalities,

and I think for autistic people as well.

I'm not sure about ADHD

but yeah, it would be
a really interesting thing to,

to look at this for autistic people, for sure.

And maybe people did this.
You can, maybe, you can look it up.

I don't have anything in my head right now
but yeah.

There should be something.

I think one of the studies that
I glanced over actually tried this.

So they had some gestures that were nonsense

I don't know if it was with abstract words
or with concrete words,

but they used nonsense gestures,

and they still had an effect,
but it was smaller.

So if you try to make this,

to integrate this into your studies,

I would suggest that you try to find
an enactment that is as sensical as it gets

I mean, it's not that it's impossible
to get enactment for abstract words,

you just have to be a little bit more
creative, and I think the more creative

you will be the more effective.
Like, similar to mnemonics,

like, the more crazy mnemonic is,
the easier it is to remember.

I could see the same effect with
enactments as well.

And if you should use signs from
sign languages,

I think if you want to that's a cool idea,
because then you automatically also learn

the sign language.
And when I was preparing this presentation

I actually thought about this.
Like why do we learn languages?

Like if I now start learning a language,
why do I not learn the sign language

that goes with it, right?

I think it would make things easier,
because you actually have

the enactment ready for you,

and it's just a cool thing, right?

You can talk with so many more people.

And also, I think in general, people
should learn sign languages regardless

This became really clear to me actually
at the Polyglot Gathering in 2019.

In Bratislava we were on some ship where
there was a party.

There was loud music, then there were some
people who knew sign language

maybe they are listening right now.

So they just started, they were like,
on the dance floor,

and instead of screaming into
each other's ears, like people usually do,

they just started to sign,
and it was so smooth, like

why should we communicate with sound
when we can do it with gestures. Right?

I think for many situations
it would be a lot easier.

So yeah, if you can use the signs
of your target language,

I think that's a cool idea.

Yeah, it does sound like that.
Indeed, indeed.

Yeah, I can totally see that.

There is a study, that I came across while
reasearching, but I didn't look into it.

If you want the reference, you can
reach out to me somehow and I can see

if I can find it and send it to you.

I didn't look deeply into it,

and I think I wouldn't find it now quickly.

So again, there's something done, but
I can't recall it from my head right now.

Well so, there's two things

maybe more things but let's start with two

So first of all when you learn a new word,

try to get the whole picture of the word.

Like the garlic example, try to imagine
how it smells, how it feels,

how you chop it, try to enact it.

Take a moment, and really try to activate
the whole functional network of this word.

And then the other thing was also just
to use input with video,

if you're learning with some input.

Look up if you find some interesting
channels on YouTube or something.

And then also, that might have not
been clear from my presentation,

if you are conversing with people, use signs.

I don't know if people do this naturally
in general, I think I kind of do it,

if I talk in my target language,
and I'm not sure about a word

I will try to make sure with my hands
that somehow,

something gets, like, to the other person.

So what I'm going for is that the other
person recognizes

what I'm trying to say, and then
gives me the word, right.

Like in the example with the glass of water,

if I don't know "drink" in some language
I would,

I would try to [MIMES]
Right? "I want to [MIMES]" Right?

And then have the other person gives me
the word, because I'm actively reducing

the uncertainty that the other perso has,
that is trying to predict

what I'm going to say,
by giving gestures. Right?

So that would be my three
practical implications for now.

Yeah so this is something that
I don't know.

Again I think it's worth trying to do this
with the sign language.

I mean, there's a system of really...

There's a system of really fitting
gestures that people use,

and it might actually be a good idea
to try this out, to use sign language

as you're learning the actual language,

to get this enactment working.

Might be more effective than
making up your own gestures.

I mean if you make up your own gestures
you have the advantage that

during the process of
coming up with the gesture,

you are engaging your brain
in a specific way

that's not there if you just get
the gesture from somebody.

So there might be an advantage there,

but the other advantage is of course
time that you can save,

and the ability to communicate
with people that can't hear

So yeah, I think that's open for
exploration, for sure.

Well you see it in sign language, right?

People that sign don't really speak.

And they get along pretty nicely.

Another question would be if all of society
as a whole can do without verbal.

That's another question, but I think
you can restructure society

in a way that everybody can communicate
with gestures, for sure.

And according to some people, it was like
that before speech developped.

So yeah, there has been some research,
not much.

If you are interested in this, make sure
to check out my presentation on this topic

from last year's Gathering,
and also from last year's conference.

The conference one is not up on YouTube
already, but the Gathering one,

and there's, in the end, I show some...

I show a study that was done on
polyglots and hyper polyglots

actually only hyper polyglots I think.

And so they put people in a FMRI scanner,
and just gave them language material.

And what they found is that
the language network

was less active than for monolinguals.

So if you listen to something
there's some areas

on the left side of your brain
that light up :

you have some typical areas,
like Broca's area, Wernicke's area,

and some other ones.

And they found that, for polyglots
this "lighting up" is less,

and the interpretation was that
the polyglots' language network,

through extensive practice, has become
more and more efficient

at dealing with language.
And therefore it needs less activation.

So this is one thing that
you observe quite often,

when there's some process that
you get really good at,

in your brain the activity
that you see goes down,

because the network gets more efficient.

So that's why this paper was aptly titled

"The Small And Efficient Network
Of Polyglots And Hyperpolyglots".

And they, you can also look this up as well,

they also made them listen to
different languages,

and there, the better known
the foreign language was

so the first experiment was completed
in english, their mother tongue,

and then the second experiment they used
their target languages like,

the second best language, third best
language and so on.

And there, the lesser known a language,
the less active the language network,

and the better known, the more active.
So you have kind of the opposite effect.

And they interpreted this as reflecting
that the more you know

in a target language,
in a foreign language,

the more of the language network
gets recruited, the more context you have.

So you have this effect of getting really
efficient for your mother tongue,

and getting more of the whole message for,

the better you know a foreign language.

So this was the last question.
Alright

Thanks for listening, thanks to
the organizers for organizing this,

the streaming works really well,
I'm really impressed

Thanks guys!