This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

The theoretical position that time principally enters mental life through the portal of perceptual organization and particularly through the formation of groups is introduced. The key concept of Gestalt, that the whole is other than the sum of the parts, is illustrated through both spatial and temporal examples. Particular emphasis is placed on the emergent properties of groups experienced in music.

All animal species seem to have some sort of communication system that is (largely or completely) innate. What is the nature of such systems? We will only have space to look at a few examples, which will show that some species use very complex systems. We can then ask, assuming that the human language capacity consists of several cognitive submodules, whether it is the case that some of those modules are shared with the innate communication capacities of other species. As we have seen, in recent years Chomsky has argued that the language capacity that is uniquely human (being specific to the domain of language) is the ability to form recursive structure. This has led to research to find out whether other animal species can also “handle” recursive patterns either in their communication systems or in other cognitive systems.

The study of individuals with hippocampal damage and amnesia provides a compelling opportunity to directly test the role of declarative memory to communication and language. Over the past two decades, we have documented disruptions in discourse and conversation as well as in more basic aspects of language in individuals with hippocampal amnesia including at the word, phrase, and sentence level across offline and online language processing tasks. This work highlights the critical contribution of hippocampal-dependent memory to language and communication and suggests that hippocampal damage or dysfunction is a risk factor for a range of language and communicative disruptions even in the absence of frank disorders of amnesia or aphasia. This work also raises questions about the reality and utility of the historical distinction between communication and language in defining cognitive-communication disorders as individuals with isolated memory impairments show deficits that cut across both communication and language.

When thinking about emotional expressions, most would probably envision facial expressions (e.g., smiling, scowling) or vocalizations (e.g., crying, laughter). Here we focus on the emotional postures and movements of the body – an important, but fairly understudied, signal for emotion perception. During emotional episodes, humans often position and move their bodies in consistent ways that may (or may not) signal their underlying feelings and future actions. We briefly review the historical antecedents of this literature, as well as current knowledge on the neural processing, developmental trajectory, and cultural differences in the emotional perception of body language. We continue by examining the role of the body as a contextualizing agent for disambiguating facial expressions, as well as their inverse relationship – from faces to bodies. Future directions and speculations about how this emerging field may evolve are discussed.

With their shallow reliefs, depictions of contorted movement, and a historically inflected formal style, first century BCE and CE Neo-Attic reliefs are distinct among Greek and Roman relief sculpture. Primarily made for an elite Roman audience, the reliefs invoke stylistic techniques from different periods of Greek art and creatively combine figural types taken from earlier objects. The scenes are also characterized by a sense of spacelessness, established by the representation of figures, objects, and landscapes in shallow relief and by the frequent distorted play with depth and space. By considering a select number of examples, this chapter argues that the reliefs’ formal elements work together to evoke multiple temporalities and spaces, so that the distinct time and space created by and in these reliefs allowed them to become powerful sites of contact. In connecting their audience with an idealized past that takes place in a generic space, the reliefs offered viewers the opportunity not only to engage visually with the past temporalities of Archaic and Classical Greece, but also to become immersed in them by sharing the same space as the stylized figures, who could slip from their timeless and spaceless background to the Roman world in which they were displayed.

This chapter provides a tour of several additional forms of human language communication apart from spoken language. Visual speech (which also contributes to audiovisual speech) requires not only visual cortex, but regions such as posterior temporal sulcus which may help integrate signals across modality. Nonverbal communication, including productions such as crying or laughter, relate to activity in the superior temporal lobes but also in other regions including the cingulate cortex and insula. Reading and the ability to decode written language highlights portions of the visual system, including the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (often referred to as the visual word form area, or VWFA). Learning to read is a complex process that involves written language, knowledge of speech sounds, and motivation. Co-speech gestures are present in children’s language development and can convey semantic information alongside spoken language; integration of such semantic gestures involves left inferior frontal gyrus and premotor cortex.

This chapter presents the current state of research in multimodal Construction Grammar with a focus on co-speech gestures. We trace the origins of the idea that constructions may have to be (re-)conceptualized as multimodal form–meaning pairs, deriving from the inherently multimodal nature of language use and the usage-based model, which attributes to language use a primordial role in language acquisition. The issue of whether constructions are actually multimodal is contested. We present two current positions in the field. The first one argues that a construction should only count as multimodal if gestures are mandatory parts of that construction. Other, more meaning-centered, approaches rely less on obligatoriness and frequency of gestural (co-)occurrences and either depart from a recurrent gesture to explore the verbal constructions it combines with or focus on a given meaning, for example, negation, and explore its multimodal conceptualization in discourse. The chapter concludes with a plea for more case studies and for the need to develop large-scale annotated corpora and apply statistical methods beyond measuring mere frequency of co-occurrence.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.