Gesture
Click here to download the draft of an article to appear in the "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences", edited by Patrick C. Hogan.

An essay on gesture and thought
Click here to download an essay which is both a synopsis and an extension of David McNeill's book Gesture and Thought exploring how gesture and language work together in a dialectic. To appear (2007) in "The fundamentals of verbal and non verbal communication and the biometrical issues", Anna Esposito, Eric Keller, Maria Marinaro, and Maja Bratanic (Editors). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Festschrift for Dan Slobin!
Click here to download a revised draft of David McNeill's chapter in a forthcoming Festschrift for Dan Slobin, edited by J. Guo, E. Lieven, S. Ervin-Tripp, N. Budwig, S. Özçaliskan, & K. Nakamura: Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. NJ, New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Modeling the dialectic
In the growth point model of language production, speech and gesture arise from a dialectic between imagery and language. How can this process be modeled? Click here to download a set of powerpoint slides from a talk David McNeill presented at MLMI 06 that tackles this issue.

Fest for Robert Krauss!
Click here to download a set of powerpoint slides from a talk David McNeill presented at the Fest for Bob Krauss.

Gesture and Thought
David McNeill's book Gesture and Thought was published in the fall of 2005, by the University of Chicago Press. You can read a precis of it by clicking here.

Multimodal Annotation Tools Comparison
In June of 2005, Katharina Rohlfing, Dan Loehr, and Susan Duncan organized a workshop in which a variety of tools were discussed and compared in a very systematic way. Please visit the wiki describing the workshop! You'll find information both about the tools compared and about how using different tools can shape analysis.

Meeting Analysis
As part of a larger project with computer scientists/engineers at Virginia Tech and Purdue Universities, we are analyzing the multimodal aspects of meetings (air force officers taking part in planning scenarios) in terms of speech (prosody, co-reference), gaze, and gesture. A summary of some of this work can be downloaded by clicking here. This project is supported by ARDA under the VACE program.

Math instruction for the visually impaired
Again with our computer science and engineering colleagues, we are examining protocols of blind students receiving math instruction via different haptic/tactile displays from the viewpoint of how well these devices convey the embodied behavior of the instructor. Given the importance of deictic gestures in math instruction, our approaches focuses on giving the student a sense of the deictic behavior of the instructor. The purpose of these displays is to facilitate discourse maintenance between the teacher and student when using a graphic for instruction. This project is supported by the NSF/HSD program.

ITR-Avatar
This project is focused on the development of a behaviorally correct avatar interface for on-line tutoring in a distance learning context. The proposed interface attempts to incorporate psycholinguistic principles that address challenges unique to this context. For example, this interface differs from canned 'text-to-speech' avatars in that we facilitate vivid interaction using the tutor's own voice along with the concomitant prosody. In a highly spatial and contextually rich interaction, providing a sense of situatedness between the tutor and student is crucial in facilitating learning. This situatedness relies on temporal as well as spatial dimensions.

KDI
The KDI (Knowledge Development Initiative) Project was a collaborative effort to build tools for the gesture, speech and gaze anaysis carried out with Professor Francis Quek and colleagues. More information is available on Professor Quek's website.

STIMULATE
This project (our first project with Francis Quek) investigated automatic discourse segmentation of multimodal communication data. The goal was to develop a means of determining discourse structure from analysis of video and voice data and to address the interpretation of gesture, speech, and gaze in discourse management. More information is available on Professor Quek's website.

The Motion Events Project
The McNeill Lab has been engaged upon a cross-linguistic comparison of the expression of motion events in speech and gesture since 1994. We have a sizable library of the same stimulus stories being retold by speakers of different languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Georgian, Swahili, and most of the European languages), by non-native speakers at different stages of learning English, by children at various ages, by adolescent deaf children not exposed to language models, and by speakers with neurological impairments (aphasic, right hemisphere damage, and split-brain patients).