Acquisition Of Multi-Media Storage and Processing for Research in Situated Communication

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With support from the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago Committee on Cognition and Communication will purchase: a video digitizing PowerMac 9500/132, 4 Silicon Graphics Indigo2 ZX workstations, 3 DigitalLinear Tape 20 GB backup systems and a Young Minds CD-ROM recorder. This equipment will permit the group to digitize multimedia recordings of communication situations and to code and analyze various properties of each digitized recording. It will also establish the groundwork for the creation of a large multimedia database of communication situations. The database will contain coded and measured information about each communicative situation. It will include classifications of gestures made qualitatively by researchers acoustical measurements of speech, and measurements of gesture movement using image processing tools. The goal of this research is to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that mediate processing in conversational interaction, and utterance production and comprehension. To fully understand verbal communication, language use must be studied in natural communicative contexts such as conversations, arguments, narratives, recall of emotional events and parent-child interaction. Natural communicative contexts contain rich sources of information that govern the dynamics of language processing in ways that cannot be observed in standard laboratory situations. The analysis system which the Chicago group will employ, will allow studies of this type to be conducted. The instrumentation system will also be used in teaching situations and be available to graduate and undergraduate students.