(New) 13 October 2026, SignLab Seminars, Anita Slonimska

On October 13, Anita Slonimska from the Max Planck Institute will present during the bi-weekly SignLab Seminar. Here is the abstract of her talk:

Communicative efficiency, defined as the optimization of the cost–benefit trade-off in communication, has been central to understanding language structure and use (Levshina, 2022). Yet prevailing accounts have largely treated language as a unimodal and static system, focusing almost exclusively on written corpora or speech. Such approaches overlook an ongoing paradigmatic shift in our understanding of language, driven by insights into how language is actually used in interaction: multimodally and adaptively (Hagoort & Ozyurek, 2025; Holler & Bavelas, 2017). Drawing particularly on recent and ongoing work on sign languages, as well as on co-speech and silent gesture, I propose a theoretical framework that reconceptualizes communicative efficiency as an adaptive property of language use, one that flexibly exploits the expressive affordances of communicative systems, including time and space, sequentiality and simultaneity, arbitrary and iconic form–meaning mappings, and acoustic and visual modalities. I argue that communicative efficiency cannot be understood without accounting for the multimodal and adaptive nature of language. Building on these insights, I outline a multimodal communicative efficiency framework and discuss how it opens up new directions for future research, which I look forward to exploring with the audience.