Multiculturality and Multimodal Languages

The way by which people communicate each other changes in the different cultures due to the different communicative expectations and depending on their cultural backgrounds. The development of the Internet has caused an increasing use of computer systems by people from different cultures, highlighting the need for interaction systems that adapt the interaction according to the cultural background of the user. This is one of the reasons of the growing research activity that explores how to consider cultural issues during the design of multimodal interaction systems. This chapter is focused on such a challenging topic, proposing a grammatical approach representing multicultural issues in multimodal languages. The approach is based on a grammar, that is able to produce a set of structured sentences, composed of gestural, vocal, audio, graphical symbols, and so on, along with the meaning that these symbols have in the different cultures. This work provides a contribution to the area of mulsemedia research, as it deals with the integration of input produced by multiple human senses and acquired through multiple sensorial media.