unconventional communication

making meaning across modalities

overview

Unconventional communication: making meaning across modalities is a workshop on how people make meaning from unconventional symbols and signs.

Most research on human communication focuses on how people use well-developed, conventionalized natural languages. In this workshop, we instead ask how people use and understand ad-hoc communicative actions, across a wide range of different modalities: a pile of dishes left on the table, an invented gesture, a yelp, a freehand sketch.

What determines how people make use of any given modality for ad-hoc communication? How does that relate to their knowledge of conventionalized language?