Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of
their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep …

Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are
associated with size, especially high front vowels with 'small'and low back vowels with …

The aim of this paper is twofold: to propose that conversation is the distinctive feature of
Homo sapiens' communication; and to show that the emergence of modern language is tied …

How language began is one of the oldest questions in science, but theories remain
speculative due to a lack of direct evidence. Here, we report two experiments that generate …

This paper investigates the influence of gestures on foreign language (FL) vocabulary
learning. In this work, we first address the state of the art in the field and then delve into the …

In co-located situations, team members use a combination of verbal and visual signals to
communicate effectively, among which positional forms play a key role. The spatial patterns …

When people interact to establish shared symbols for novel objects or concepts, they often
rely on multiple communicative modalities as well as on alignment (ie, cross-participant …

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key
innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the 'baseline'of generalized ape …

Due to the robust iconic potential of visual representations, gestural, and pantomimic
hypotheses of language origins are well suited to provide solutions to the bootstrapping …

Everyday conversation is, as the term suggests, a frequent and seemingly effortless
phenomenon. However, when closely examined, it is seen that the process of achieving …