Judgmental perception of co-speech gestures in MDD.

Cognitive bias in depression may increase sensitivity to judgmental appraisal of communicative cues. Nonverbal communication encompassing co-speech gestures is crucial for social functioning and is perceived differentially by men and women, however, little is known about the effect of depression on the perception of appraisal. We investigate if a cognitive bias influences the perception of appraisal and judgement of nonverbal communication in major depressive disorder (MDD).

Metaphor processing is supramodal semantic processing: The role of the bilateral lateral temporal regions in multimodal communication.

This paper presents an fMRI study on healthy adult understanding of metaphors in multimodal communication. We investigated metaphors expressed either only in coverbal gestures ("monomodal metaphors") or in speech with accompanying gestures ("multimodal metaphors"). Monomodal metaphoric gestures convey metaphoric information not expressed in the accompanying speech (e.

Visuo-Kinetic Signs Are Inherently Metonymic: How Embodied Metonymy Motivates Forms, Functions, and Schematic Patterns in Gesture.

This paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of metonymy (e.

Interpretation of Social Interactions: Functional Imaging of Cognitive-Semiotic Categories During Naturalistic Viewing.

Social interactions arise from patterns of communicative signs, whose perception and interpretation require a multitude of cognitive functions. The semiotic framework of Peirce's Universal Categories (UCs) laid ground for a novel cognitive-semiotic typology of social interactions. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 16 volunteers watched a movie narrative encompassing verbal and non-verbal social interactions.

Handling or being the concept: An fMRI study on metonymy representations in coverbal gestures.

In "Two heads are better than one," "head" stands for people and focuses the message on the intelligence of people. This is an example of figurative language through metonymy, where substituting a whole entity by one of its parts focuses attention on a specific aspect of the entity. Whereas metaphors, another figurative language device, are substitutions based on similarity, metonymy involves substitutions based on associations.

Perceived Conventionality in Co-speech Gestures Involves the Fronto-Temporal Language Network.

Face-to-face communication is multimodal; it encompasses spoken words, facial expressions, gaze, and co-speech gestures. In contrast to linguistic symbols (e.g.