Embodiment Awareness, Mathematics Discourse, and the Blind

当我们说话时，我们的手势、凝视、姿势和面部表情等具体行为都为交流过程服务。本研究以人类多模态交际的心理语言学理论为基础。从多模态行为到语言的一条路径是由潜在的心理意象连接起来的。对于说话者来说，这种空间意象与句法元素无关，而是与驱动表达的思想单位（声音表达和可见展示）有关。手势揭示了伴随话语的焦点，并与展开话语中有新闻价值元素的意义有关。这是当前项目的基本前提，在这个项目中，PI将专注于盲人学生的数学话语和教育。数学推理具有丰富的空间意象，这种意象通过手势表现出来。此外，手势有能力创造数学概念的图像，作为“沉思的对象”。当数学教学可以使用图形/插图时，话语流通常位于图形的空间参考手势中。对盲人的研究表明，他们在视觉意象、记忆和概念化方面有着非凡的能力。然而，盲人学生在数学教育上往往落后于视力正常的学生。PI认为，对盲人学生来说，数学教学的一个重大障碍在于缺乏对教师化身的视觉访问。他指出，在这样的学生中，我们有一个能够访问图形内容的群体（通过触觉图像技术），但在视觉上没有意识到对话者的具体行为。他建议通过为盲人学生提供一种化身意识来解决这个问题，在使用触觉设备提供化身意识元素的辅助交流方法的帮助下。为此，PI将进行一系列“感知和行动”实验，以评估这些设备的有效性，然后在数学教学中对盲人和视力正常的学生进行第二系列实验，用视频拍摄，并进行前后测试，以评估教师和学生在教学过程中传达的意象内容的质量和数量，并确定相关性，如果有的话。这些与数学概念化的形成有关。更广泛的影响：本项目应对所有年级视障学生的包容性数学教学产生重大的直接影响；迄今为止，还没有研究过为盲人学生提供化身意识，并有可能赋予这些学生权力。此外，了解体现意识的渠道将影响未来远程学习系统的设计，并将为如何在基于互联网的教学中最好地为学生提供体现提示提供见解。

When we speak, our embodied behavior of gesture, gaze, posture, and facial expression are brought into the service of the communicative process. This research is grounded in psycholinguistic theories of multimodal human communication. One path from multimodal behavior to language is bridged by the underlying mental imagery. This spatial imagery, for a speaker, relates not to the elements of syntax, but to the units of thought that drive the expression (vocal utterance and visible display). Gestures reveal the focal points of the accompanying utterances, and relate to the meaning of the newsworthy elements of the unfolding discourse. This is the underlying premise of the current project, in which the PI will focus on math discourse and education for blind students.Mathematical reasoning is rich in spatial imagery that is revealed in gesture. Furthermore, gesture has the capacity to create images of the math concepts that serve as "objects of contemplation." When a graphic/illustration is available for math instruction, the discourse stream is typically situated with gestures of spatial reference into the graphic. Research with individuals who are blind suggests that they have remarkable capacity for visual imagery, memory, and conceptualization. However, students who are blind tend to lag behind sighted students in mathematics education. The PI posits that a significant impediment to math instruction for students who are blind lies in the lack of visual access to the embodiment of the instructor. He notes that we have, in such students, a population that is able to access graphical content (through tactile image technology), but is not visually aware of the embodied behavior of the interlocutor. He proposes to remedy this problem by affording blind students a sense of embodiment awareness, with the help of augmentative communication approaches that employ tactile devices to provide elements of embodiment awareness. To this end, the PI will perform a series of "perception and action" experiments to assess the efficacy of such devices, followed by a second series of experiments with blind and sighted students in mathematics instruction, to be captured on video, and with pre- and post- tests, to assess the quality and quantity of imagistic content both conveyed by the teacher and by the student in the course of the instruction, and to determine the correlation, if any, between these and the formation of math conceptualization. Broader Impacts: This project should have significant direct impact on inclusive mathematics instruction at all grade levels for visually impaired students; provision of a sense of embodiment awareness to students who are blind has not hitherto been studied, and has the potential for empowering such students. Furthermore, understanding the channels for embodiment awareness will affect the design of future distance learning systems, and will afford insights on how best to provide embodiment cues to students in Internet-based instruction.