Achievement

Matthew Stone, who is working with trainee Paul Ringstad, are studying how human speakers use speech and gesture to communicate in order to design virtual interfaces that communicate effectively with humans. The research group developed a theory in which interlocutors make sense of multiple communicative actions by extracting coherence relations, such as explanation, narration or depiction, to link the interpretations into an intelligible whole. These inferences allow communicators to develop and interpret gesture in open-ended ways (Lascarides & Stone, A Formal Semantic Analysis of Gesture, Journal of Semantics, In Press).