Bridging gaps in common ground: Speakers design their gestures for their listeners.

Abstract

Communication is shaped both by what we are trying to say and by whom we are saying it to. We examined whether and how shared information influences the gestures speakers produce along with their speech. Unlike prior work examining effects of common ground on speech and gesture, we examined a situation in which some speakers have the same amount of mutually shared experience with their listener but the relevance of the information from shared experience is different for listeners in different conditions. Additionally, speakers and listeners in all conditions shared a visual perspective. Speakers and listeners solved a version of the Tower of Hanoi task together. Speakers then solved a second version of the task without the listener present with the manner of disk movement manipulated; the manner was either the same as or different from the version that had been solved with the listener present. Thus, speakers' knowledge of the relevance of shared knowledge was manipulated. We measured the content of speech along with the physical form and content of the accompanying hand gesture. Although speakers did not modulate their spoken language, speakers who knew their listeners had not previously experienced the appropriate manner of completion gestured higher in space, highlighting manner information, but without altering the physical gesture trajectory. Thus, gesture can be sensitive to the knowledge of listeners even when speech is not. Speakers' gestures can play an independent role in reflecting common ground between speakers and listeners, perhaps by simultaneously incorporating both speaker and listener perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record

Hippocampal declarative memory supports gesture production: Evidence from amnesia

“…One such factor is the common ground – the mutually shared knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions (Clark & Marshall, 1978) – between conversation partners that guides language production. Common ground has been shown to affect gesture in multiple ways, with higher levels of common ground leading to both higher and lower rates of gesture production (Gerwing & Bavelas, 2004; Hilliard, O’Neal, Plumert, & Cook, 2015; Holler & Wilkin, 2009) and gestures that are lower in space (Hilliard & Cook, 2015b) than when common ground is lacking. In the data presented here, we might expect that healthy comparison participants would gesture more for the episodic tasks, since their listener, the experimenter, lacks knowledge about their specific autobiographical experiences but does have more generalized knowledge about information in the procedural tasks (shopping, making a sandwich).…”

A technique for continuous measurement of body movement from video

“…In cases of non-linear movements, the distance between each point in a movement can be calculated and summed to determine total size. Curves can also be fit to the data when appropriate, and characteristics of these curves can be studied (see Cook & Tanenhaus, 2009;Hilliard & Cook, 2015). Note that this approach to calculating gesture size allows the placement of the hand relative to the body to be unconfounded from the location of the gesture in space.…”

“…Although it is often the presence of a particular behavior that is of interest, movements can vary in a continuous fashion in ways that might also be informative. Hand gestures may be raised higher when the information is new to the listener (Hilliard & Cook, 2015), a nod may be larger when the listener vehemently agrees with something, and leg bouncing may become slower as the speaker becomes less anxious. Movements of the body are of interest to researchers across psychology, linguistics, anthropology, dance, communication, and other fields.…”

Age-related differences in multimodal recipient design: younger, but not older adults, adapt speech and co-speech gestures to common ground

“…In the presence of mutually shared knowledge, when common ground is assumed, gestures often become less informative (e.g. Gerwing & Bavelas, 2004;Hilliard & Cook, 2016;Holler & Stevens, 2007;Parrill, 2010), and/or less frequent, at least in absolute terms. In relative terms, this means that, most commonly, speech and gesture reduce to a comparable degree so that gesture rate does not differ in the presence or absence of mutually shared knowledge (e.g.…”