Who do we gesture for?

Do gestures communicate information to listeners, or do they help speakers formulate and manage their utterances e Ruiter, 2003 Most of the discussion so far in this chapter has considered how gestures are used by speakers to communicate something to listeners, either in terms of con tent or conversation management. It has also been claimed that gestures help speakers to find words and formulate utterances (Beattie, 1980; Hadar & Butterworth, 1997). One study has explicitly tested who gestures are for, and the findings indicate that they have a strong listener focus (Jacobs & Garnham, 2007).

In this study, participants were asked to describe cartoons. They were placed in one of four conditions. The conditions differed as to whether the cartoon was already known to both the speaker and the listener, was known only to the speaker, was known only to the listener, or was known by neither. Speakers tended to gesture much less in the first and third conditions than in the other two. In other words, when the listeners already knew what was being described either by having heard it described before or by dint of being able to see the cartoons themselves, then the speaker used fewer gestures. This suggests that gestures – at least in this task – are primarily listener-oriented.

 Neurophysiological studies of participants listening to and watching speakers who are gesturing reinforce the close link between speech and gesture for the listener. Stimuli in one study included verbs which either matched (wrote) or mismatched l s a preceding object noun phrase (shopping list) the stimuli were in Dutch, using constructions in which the object precedes the verb. The gesture in the video recording that accompanied the speech also matched or mismatched that object i.e. was a writing or hitting gesture. The crucial finding from the comparisons of matching and mismatching conditions was that key language processing areas in Broca’s area, see Chapter 13 were involved in the integration of both gesture and speech with the preceding object noun phrase (Willems, – zyurek & Hagoort, 2007).

 However, there is also strong evidence that gestures can have facilitative functions for the speaker, helping them to carry out the speech production task. At a most basic level, this notion is supported by findings from experiments where gesturing was impeded. Under such circumstances, speakers showed reduced fluency. This seemed particularly marked if what they were talking about had a lot of spatial content, such as describing the layout of a room. This reduction in fluency may be a result of inhibiting the word retrieval processes. A range of other research supports this idea that gestures facilitate word retrieval. One study found that the less familiar a word was, the greater the time lag between the onset of the gesture and the onset of the spoken word (Morrel-Samuels & Krauss, 1992). This is compatible with the idea that the gesture occurs at the initiation of the lexical retrieval process, with the less familiar words taking longer to find, measured from that point. In another study, speakers taking part in a tip-of-the-tongue elicitation experiment see Chapter 4 were more likely to enter the tip-of-the-tongue state if they were prevented from using gestures.

 It has been proposed that gestures help speakers maintain an image of the concepts that they are trying to express, thus helping the language formulation processes to make the connection between concepts lemmas and linguistic expressions lexemes. One interpretation is that gestures may reinforce certain semantic properties in a way that affects their salience in the pre-verbal message. Another is that a gesture helps the speaker access a word from their mental dictionary by a mechanism of visual priming, just as seeing a picture of an object helps speakers access the spoken form of a word used in naming that picture. It is interesting to note in this context that iconic gestures are found most often before nouns, but also fairly frequently before verbs and adjectives. Fewer than one in five are found before other types of word. In other words, gestures are predominantly found before content words, the words which we have earlier seen are most likely to involve more difficult word retrieval.

In addition, although iconic gestures typically precede the spoken mate rial to which they are linked by about one second, the asynchrony can be longer and is quite variable in one study from less than half a second to almost four seconds. Gesture duration is also variable and is usually long enough to mean that a gesture is still continuing when the speaker pro duces the related speech material. This suggests that the gesture is initiated as the speaker enters the lexicalisation process and might be terminated once the lexical search has been completed. The variability in the duration of the gesture arises because the speaker cannot predict how long a specific lexical search will take.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

The elements of conceptual blending

The nature of blending

Towards a theory of conceptual integration

The origins of Blending Theory

Conceptual blending

Meaning construction and mental spaces Summery

Epistemic distance

The tense-aspect system in Mental Spaces Theory

Tense and aspect in English

The dynamic nature of meaning construction

An illustration of mental space construction

Roles and values