Research into gesture in human communication has a long history (for summaries see Kendon 1999, 1998, Roy, 1996). The gestural repertoires of children with and without speech and motor impairment elicited in response to words, non-speech sounds and visual stimuli with and without sound tracks (Roy et al 1992,3,4,5, Panayi, Roy, Woll, 1998) will be presented. These repertoires of intentional movements are typically not rehearsed or imitative. Examples from the corpora will be used to introduce a series of research questions currently being investigated. These questions included:
What is the nature of gesture as a motor process? What could be the contributing role of imagery? How could the study of gestural repertoires of children with and without impairment inform the current debates on the role of gesture in language? These questions are being investigate in light of current theories of motor action, cognitive process of imagery (Richardson, 1999), and the nature of gestural communication (McNeill, 1998, Cole et al, 1998, Hadar & Butterworth, 1997, Hadar, 1998, Golden-Meadow, 1998).
The work begins to suggest a method of analysis for gesture that will enable the construction of a system for better understanding of gesture in human communication and the machine recognition of gesture (Roy, 1996, Panayi et al 1998, 1999). Ideally we would wish to take any gesture and know it’s elements and then be able to represent these elements in a symbolic database. An analysis framework will be presented that suggests ways in which we can examine gestural data with a view to selecting features that may successfully form the bases of such a symbolic database (Roy, 1996).
In the future it is envisioned that an intelligent machine system would be able to synthesise or analysis any given gestural repertoire (Roy 1990). The implications for human-machine interaction and the potential for therapeutic applications will be touched upon (Panayi, Roy, 1999).