A spreading-activation model of the semantic coordination of speech and gesture

Kopp S, Bergmann K, Kahl S. A spreading-activation model of the semantic coordination of speech and gesture. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society; 2013: 823-828.In naturally occurring speech and gesture, meaning occurs or- ganized and distributed across the modalities in different ways. The underlying cognitive processes are largely unexplored. We propose a model based on activation spreading within dy- namically shaped multimodal memories, in which coordina- tion arises from the interplay of visuo-spatial and linguistically shaped representations under given communicative and cogni- tive resources. An implementation of this model is presented and first simulation results are reported