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Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century
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Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 January 2024) | Viewed by 13406

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Ana M. Cestero Mancera

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Departamento de Filología, Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad de Alcalá, 28801 Madrid, Spain
Interests: non-verbal communication; sociolinguistics; pragmatics and conversation analysis; linguistic geography; applied linguistics for teaching Spanish as a foreign language
Prof. Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Departamento de Filología Moderna, Universidad de Alcalá, 28801 Madrid, Spain
Interests: non-verbal communication; discourse analysis (particularly cohesion, coherence, persuasion); applied linguistics for teaching English as a foreign language (specifically at the tertiary level)

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Human communication is a complex process that involves much more than knowing and using the linguistic system, since communicative effectiveness depends, in varying degrees, on the deployment of non-verbal signs, in combination or co-structure with verbal ones. The goal of this Special Issue is to showcase state-of-the-art work on the study of non-verbal communication in the 21st century. For some decades now, books and monographs on the subject have not been published; hence, an up-to-date vision of the field is much needed. Our aim is to fill this gap by examining non-verbal signs as communicative units that take part in any speech event and carry part of the communication load.

The overall target length of the Special Issue is between 13-15 articles of 8,000-10,000 words each, preceded by an Introduction by the editors.

With the aim of delineating the present state of research on non-verbal communication and its future projection, we encourage contributions consisting of review or research articles on any of the topics outlined below.

Sections of the volume:

Introduction to the volume by the Editors.

Part 1. General articles on the development of the non-verbal communication literature in the 21st century with the aim of shaping a theoretical and methodological framework of non-verbal communication knowledge and research.

Part 2. Empirical studies on diverse topics whose results will inform research on non-verbal communication signs in any of the four systems that conform to it: paralanguage, kinesics, proxemics and chronemics.

Paralanguage: Use and function of phonetic qualities and modifiers as non-verbal signs, sound indicators of physiological and emotional reactions, quasi-lexical elements, pauses and silences.
Kinesics: Gestures, manners and postures.
Proxemics.
Chronemics.

We particularly encourage contrastive studies focusing on social, situational and, specifically, cultural variation in the use and function of non-verbal signs.

Part 3. Studies on the use and function of non-verbal communication in fields of application in which non-verbal communication is particularly relevant: politics, marketing, business communication, education and classroom interaction, second language teaching/learning/acquisition, translation and interpretation, intercultural mediation, computer-mediated communication, police and forensic investigation, or clinical and medical communication.

Tentative Completion Schedule

  • Abstract Submission Deadline: 1 July 2023    
  • Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 10 October 2023    
  • Full Manuscript Deadline: 10 January 2024    

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors ([email protected]) or to Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Prof. Dr. Ana M. Cestero Mancera
Prof. Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • non-verbal communication
  • nonverbal communication
  • paralanguage
  • kinesics
  • gesture
  • proxemics
  • chronemics

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

37 pages, 23753 KiB  
Article
May the Force Be with You... Gesturality of the Barcelonians Associated with Mockery, Insult and Protection
by Mar Forment and Cristina Illamola
Languages 2024, 9(6), 191; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9060191 - 23 May 2024
Viewed by 906
Abstract
The aim of the article is to inventory gestures related to mockery, insult, attracting good luck, or warding off bad luck that a group of informants from Barcelona have performed. The data come from the application of the survey from the Atlas de [...] Read more.
The aim of the article is to inventory gestures related to mockery, insult, attracting good luck, or warding off bad luck that a group of informants from Barcelona have performed. The data come from the application of the survey from the Atlas de Gestos, whose task is to collect gestures from the Pan-Hispanic context to describe the gestural repertoire of each territory and conduct comparative studies. The results, interpreted based on social factors (gender, age, and level of instruction), confirm the wide range of gestures for different functions (10 for mockery, 11 for insult and attracting good luck, and 9 for warding off bad luck). Regarding differences based on social variables, the results allow for indicating trends, namely, while the most used gesture to express mockery is sticking out the tongue, young people prefer the gesture of pointing and laughing, and informants over 55 years old only prefer laughing. Concerning insults, the use of peineta is widespread, although differences in behavior between men and women are observed. As for attracting good luck, Barcelona informants opt for crossing fingers, although older generations use gestures with more religious connotations, such as clasping hands. Finally, to ward off bad luck, Barcelona locals mention the gesture of crossing made with the index fingers of each hand. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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24 pages, 5405 KiB  
Article
Nonverbal Communication in Classroom Interaction and Its Role in Italian Foreign Language Teaching and Learning
by Pierangela Diadori
Languages 2024, 9(5), 164; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9050164 - 1 May 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1953
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art of recent research on nonverbal communication in L2 classroom interaction, in particular on teachers’ and students’ gestures, and then focus on a case of gestures in an L2 Italian classroom. [...] Read more.
The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art of recent research on nonverbal communication in L2 classroom interaction, in particular on teachers’ and students’ gestures, and then focus on a case of gestures in an L2 Italian classroom. A corpus of video-recorded interactions (CLODIS) were analyzed to answer the following research question: How do L2 Italian native teachers behave when addressing international students? Are there differences with what has been observed in other foreign language (L2) teaching contexts? Both previous data-based research on multimodality in L2 classes and the analysis on CLODIS show that teachers select and coordinate multiple semiotic modes as interactional resources to complete various teaching tasks. Furthermore, Italian native teachers use not only the typical pedagogical gestures (both iconic and metaphorical), but also culturally specific emblems that may cause misunderstandings or inappropriate mirroring effects. For these reasons, it is important that L2 teachers develop a good multimodal awareness, especially if they teach their mother tongue to foreign students and if they belong to a “contact culture”, as is the case observed in L2 Italian classes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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15 pages, 6445 KiB  
Article
Gestural Alignment in Spoken Simultaneous Interpreting: A Mixed-Methods Approach
by Inés Olza
Languages 2024, 9(4), 151; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040151 - 21 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1135
Abstract
Cognitive and behavioral alignment plays a major role in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter centrally monitoring and accommodating his/her behavior to that of the speaker-source. In parallel, the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice, as well as its degree of convergence with respect [...] Read more.
Cognitive and behavioral alignment plays a major role in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter centrally monitoring and accommodating his/her behavior to that of the speaker-source. In parallel, the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice, as well as its degree of convergence with respect to the gestures of the speaker-source, has been scarcely analyzed until very recently. The multimodal data for this study were collected under (quasi-)experimental conditions in a real court interpreting setting during spoken training exercises performed by two novice interpreters. In this exploratory study, the gestural performance of the interpreters, including their degree of gestural alignment towards the speaker-source, is analyzed and compared using a mixed-methods approach to a randomized sample of the recorded data. The analysis combines a basic descriptive quantification of body movements and a qualitative and comparative analysis of the gesture types performed by the speaker-source and the interpreters. The results show that, in spite of individual differences in interpreting fluency and gestural styles, both interpreters tend to align with the speaker-source’s gestural behavior in several ways, and thus a basic taxonomy of gestural convergence between the speaker-source and the interpreters is defined according to several criteria (mainly, gesture presence and gesture type). Our conclusions also allow us to formulate new research questions and hypotheses to be tested in future studies (e.g., types of gestures by the speaker-source that prompt a higher degree of alignment). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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16 pages, 1230 KiB  
Article
An Early Intervention in Gestural Communication in Chilean Children from Psychosocially At-Risk Backgrounds and Its Impact on Language Skills at 18 Months Old
by Chamarrita Farkas
Languages 2024, 9(4), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040146 - 16 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1444
Abstract
The emergence of symbolic gestures is a solid milestone in early childhood development. Interventions that intentionally promote them have contributed to children’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, these studies have mainly been conducted in the USA with middle-SES families, and such research [...] Read more.
The emergence of symbolic gestures is a solid milestone in early childhood development. Interventions that intentionally promote them have contributed to children’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, these studies have mainly been conducted in the USA with middle-SES families, and such research has considerably decreased in recent years. This study aimed to assess the effects of an intentional intervention for promoting symbolic gestures in the expressive and comprehensive language of Chilean children who were aged 18 months. Sixty-nine highly psychosocially at-risk children were assessed at 5–9 months and then at 18 months. Teachers from half of the nurseries involved in the study received the intervention. The assessment included a report on the children’s gestural vocabulary, the CDI, and the language scale of BSID-III. The results showed that the children in the intervention group had a significantly greater gestural vocabulary at 18 months and they performed better in their expressive language than the children in the control group did. Additionally, this study aimed to analyze if this intervention affected children differentially in consideration of their language development (adequate and at-risk). The results showed that children with adequate development improved their language when they received the intervention, but those from the at-risk group did not. The implications of these results for the design of interventions at an early age are discussed while considering children from different sociocultural backgrounds and with different language development. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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22 pages, 1977 KiB  
Article
Use and Function of Gestures in Persuasive Business Communication: A Contrastive Study between Spanish and English
by Ana M. Cestero Mancera and Mercedes Díez-Prados
Languages 2024, 9(4), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040145 - 15 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1425
Abstract
This study sheds light on the types and frequencies of kinesic signs used in business pitches by entrepreneurs in Spanish and English, as well as the functions these nonverbal signs fulfil to contribute to the persuasiveness of their presentations. The corpus consists of [...] Read more.
This study sheds light on the types and frequencies of kinesic signs used in business pitches by entrepreneurs in Spanish and English, as well as the functions these nonverbal signs fulfil to contribute to the persuasiveness of their presentations. The corpus consists of 20 pitches (10 in each language) from two equivalent TV programs (the reality shows Dragons’ Den and Tu Oportunidad from the UK and Spain, respectively). A specific method of analysis previously developed by Cestero Mancera is used to identify signs in an inductive, qualitative way that allows us to apply a quantitative methodology to distinguish among the different subpopulations of the subjects studied (male and female presenters in Spanish and English presentations). The results show that facial gesturing is the most frequent type used by all presenters, although speakers of each language seem to have diverse preferences for the rest of the signs (head, hand and other body gestures). Kinesic signs apparently display the same pragmatic functions in Spanish and English, although they are more frequently used in Spanish (63.78% of the 784 signs found) than English (36.22%). Gender may be considered an influential factor when observed within the same language but not as a variable; furthermore, gender preferences are reversed when associated with language (i.e., female Spanish presentations display the most signs, while English presentations by females display the least; male presentations are in between these, there being more in Spanish than in English presentations). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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18 pages, 2305 KiB  
Article
The Use of Silence in Conversation among Women in Spanish: An Expression of Feminine Conversational Style?
by Beatriz Méndez-Guerrero and Laura Camargo-Fernández
Languages 2024, 9(3), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030097 - 13 Mar 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1579
Abstract
Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional [...] Read more.
Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional communicative resource whose meanings vary depending on contextual, social, and cultural factors. The pragmatic and sociolinguistic nature of this phenomenon calls for examining each case considering the context, the social variables, and the relationship between participants. The aim of this study is to determine the use of silence in Spanish by young women. To achieve this, a corpus of 9 h of spontaneous conversations among six young Spanish university women (1.5 h per participant) was analyzed. The analysis has allowed identifying, first, a series of communicative functions of silence produced by the participants. A relationship between the duration of silence and its communicative function has also been established. Finally, differences in the use of silence by the participants have been found, determined by the interlocutor (male/female), which confirms that women use silence as a basic interactive strategy differently when talking with women and when they do so with men. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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18 pages, 448 KiB  
Article
Non-Verbal Communication in Ancient Rome: Eyebrow Gestures
by M. Antonia Fornés Pallicer and Mercè Puig Rodríguez-Escalona
Languages 2024, 9(3), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030092 - 10 Mar 2024
Viewed by 2091
Abstract
This article analyses the communicative power of eyebrows in ancient Rome within the framework of broader research into gestures from the same period. Our research uses the corpus of Latin literature to describe evidence of gestures in said texts. It then identifies the [...] Read more.
This article analyses the communicative power of eyebrows in ancient Rome within the framework of broader research into gestures from the same period. Our research uses the corpus of Latin literature to describe evidence of gestures in said texts. It then identifies the expressions used by the authors to refer to them and describes how they were performed. Moreover, by analysing the context, it explains the meanings the authors attribute to them. Although the texts do not describe these gestures with the precision required by non-verbal communication research today, our analysis of the selected extracts has enabled us to identify four free eyebrow gestures—contracting, raising, relaxing, and lowering—and associate a meaning to them. In this regard, we have uncovered that Roman writers introduce eyebrow gestures in their work to communicate emotions such as arrogance and humility, and anger or seriousness, and even to identify certain characters. In turn, these gestures are also used to express disapproval and assent in place of speech. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Non-Verbal Communication in the 21st Century)
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