Several lines of research within developmental psychology, experimental semiotics and language origins studies have recently converged in their interest in pantomime as a system of bodily communication distinct from both language (spoken or signed) and nonlinguistic gesticulation. These approaches underscore the effectiveness of pantomime, which despite lack of semiotic conventions is capable of communicating complex meanings. However, very little research is available on the structural underpinnings of this effectiveness, that is, the specific properties of pantomime that determine its communicative success. To help fill in this gap, we conducted an exploratory rating study aimed at identifying those properties of pantomime that facilitate its understanding. We analysed an existing corpus of 602 recordings of whole-body re-enactments of short transitive events, coding each of them for 6 properties, and found out that the presence of salient elements (conspicuous objects in a specific semantic space), image mapping (representing the physical orientation of the object), and gender markers (distinguishing between the represented characters) increased the guessability of pantomimes.

中文翻译：

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哑剧里有什么？

发展心理学、实验符号学和语言起源研究中的几项研究最近集中在他们对哑剧的兴趣上，哑剧是一种不同于语言（口语或手语）和非语言手势的身体交流系统。这些方法强调了哑剧的有效性，尽管缺乏符号学惯例，哑剧仍能够传达复杂的含义。然而，关于这种有效性的结构基础的研究很少，即决定其交际成功的哑剧的特定属性。为了帮助填补这一空白，我们进行了一项探索性评级研究，旨在确定有助于理解哑剧的那些特性。