|
Language and Movement
Motor timing and reading skill
Past research with colleagues from Haskins Laboratories (Carello, LeVasseur, & Schmidt, 2002) has investigated whether a relationship between reading ability and motor timing performance exists in a high literacy population. Undergraduate students performed reading tasks that measured different components of reading skill. The participants’ reading abilities were assessed in terms of comprehension, phonological decoding ability, and reading rate. These participants also performed three computerized tapping tasks in order to assess motor performance. Data collected supports the hypothesis that there is a link between reading skill and motor timing performance. The better the participants’ decoding processes, the better they are at coordinating sequential movements in the inter-digit coordination task.
Speech as a mediator for entrainment
More recent research with Holy Cross students Tracy Espirtu and Kate Curtis has investigated whether speech can be a mediator for entrainment with environmental rhythms such as those produced by other people. Previous research has shown that individuals become unintentionally coordinated with other people they are interacting. Our recent studies seek to investigate the hypothesis that intrapersonal coordination between speech and body movements underlies interpersonal coordination. Participants were asked to complete a rhythmic reading task, naming letters that appeared on a screen, while also swinging a handheld pendulum. The extent to which the wrist movements became coordinated with the presentations of the letters on the screen (reading rhythm) was analyzed using relative timing and cross spectral measures.
Speech gestures and cognitive performance
Other research has investigated a recent finding that gesturing is not only used to communicate to a listener but also to facilitate the speaker's own cognitive performance. In a recent recent study we investigated whether any kind of movement or necessarily motor movement temporally coordinated with speech facilitates lexical retrieval. Participants were asked to perform a lexical retrieval task while simultaneously holding the hands still, moving them freely, or while moving the hands in stereotyped rhythmic fashion. We found that any motor movement of the hands will facilitate lexical retrieval.
|
