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化的行为都被纳入到交流过程中。本研究以心理语言学的多模式交际理论为基础。从多模式行为到语言的一条路径是通过潜在的心理意象搭建起来的。对于说话者来说，这种空间意象与句法元素无关，而与驱动表达的思维单位(有声发声和视觉显示)有关。手势揭示了伴随话语的焦点，并与展开的话语中具有新闻价值的元素的含义有关。这是当前项目的基本前提，PI将专注于数学话语和盲人学生的教育。数学推理包含丰富的空间意象，这些意象通过手势揭示出来。此外，手势有能力创造出数学概念的形象，作为“沉思的对象”。当图形/插图可用于数学教学时，话语流通常位于图形中的空间参考手势中。对盲人的研究表明，他们在视觉意象、记忆和概念化方面具有非凡的能力。然而，盲人学生在数学教育中往往落后于有视力的学生。PI认为，对于盲人学生来说，数学教学的一个重大障碍在于缺乏对导师化身的视觉接触。他指出，在这样的学生中，我们有一群人能够访问图形内容(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。他建议通过给盲人学生提供化身意识来纠正这个问题，并借助增强型交流方法，使用触觉设备来提供化身意识的元素。为此，PI将进行一系列“知觉和行动”实验，以评估这些装置的效果，然后对数学教学中的盲人和视力障碍学生进行第二系列实验，拍摄视频，并进行前后测试，以评估教师和学生在教学过程中传达的想象内容的质量和数量，并确定这些内容与数学概念化形成之间的相关性(如果有)。更广泛的影响：该项目应该对所有年级的视障学生的包容性数学教学产生重大的直接影响；向盲人学生提供体现意识迄今尚未得到研究，并有可能增强这类学生的能力。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向学生提供体现线索提供见解。

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.