New Ideas in Language

The festival is part of a global program of events under the overall title of 'Languages, Cultures and Modalities: New Perspectives for the Cognitive Study of Language', which benefited from the presence of leading Russian and foreign scientists specialising in polymodal* communication and experimental methods for the study of language and cognition. Irina Babicheva, Alina Drevetskaya, Svetlana Ozerova, Ruslana Shcheblykina and Anastasia Nechet, all studying at the Pedagogical Institute's Faculty of Foreign Languages, attended the event, thanks to an Intra-University Grant. They also attended the plenary session where they heard talks by Professor Sotaro Kita, of the University of Warwick's Department of Psychology, and Dr Aliyah Morgenstern, from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle's (Paris 3 University) Department of the English-Speaking World. They had the opportunity to test and witness the latest methods being used to analyse verbal and non-verbal components of speech communication, such as ELAN, eytreking, and MoCap, as demonstrated by Dominique Boutet, Jean-François Jego, and Vincent Meyrueis from Paris 8 University. In this interactive class called 'Record, Analyse and Annotate Gestures and Sign Language with Motion-Capture Technology' our students were able to visit the virtual world with the help of virtual reality glasses and joysticks, and assess the success of this technology. The whole event was English speaking.

* 'Polymodal' means that it responds to different stimulus (i.e. heat, light or touch)