How Well do Visual Verbs Work in Daily Communication for Young and Old Adults?

Summary:
In this paper, Xiaojuan Ma and Perry R. Cook (both from Princeton) analyze the different ways that verbs can be visually displayed, and how these displays are conveyed to both young (20-39) and old (55+) adults. The four visualizations in question are a single image, a panel of four images, an animation, and a video clip. They chose 48 frequently used verbs from the British National Corpus to visualize for their research. Note that verbs are harder to convey via images as compared to nouns, as most nouns represent a single, tangible thing.

The four visualizations for "work".

The images for the verbs were taken from tagged web pages. The author recruited raters to give them feedback as to watch images best depicted each verb, and then chose the top four. The animations were taken from a sight specializing in verb animations, and the videos were recorded by the authors themselves.

After comparing the four representations to a group from each age population, the authors found that young adults performed better for all visual modes. The values of responses for both these groups were considered by WordNet score. This scoring is done on a six-point scale based on distance from the target verb. An exact match between the verb and the user's guess is awarded 6 points, a synonym is awarded 5 points, and an irrelevant guess yields 1 point.

WordNet score results for the two groups

The authors also found that the verbs best recognized all shared certain visual characteristics in common. Some of these include simple backgrounds, limited visual effects, and a limited use of symbols (such as a heart or a question mark to represent the verb). They also make note of the fact that different gestures have different meanings to people of different cultures and age groups, and therefore the visualizations should be examined for universality. In the future, the authors hope to apply their visual designs to help people with Aphasia (a disorder categorized by understanding written and spoken language).


Discussion:
I thought this article was interesting. I didn't actually see the purpose for the research, however, until I read where they were interested in helping people with Aphasia. With that in mind, it casts the research in a whole new light. By visualizing verbs, people who have difficulty speaking and writing can still communicate with others, which is of obvious importance. I think that future research should be done to with actual people suffering from Aphasia so that the benefits to them can be directly determined. Maybe an entire, universal language could be created based on visualizations, something of great benefit to anyone attempting to communicate across language barriers.