Communicative Effects of Speech-Mismatched Gestures

Development of multimodal discourse comprehension: cohesive use of space by gestures

“…Second, we provide evidence that adults integrate information from spoken discourse and cohesive gestures. This finding is in line with previous studies conducted in English, which showed that adult listeners take into account information conveyed by a speaker's gestures that are anaphorically used (Cassell et al, 1999;Goodrich & Hudson-Kam, 2012;McNeill et al, 1994).…”

“…Though no previous studies investigated children's comprehension of cohesive gestures, studies have shown that adult listener-viewers take up information from the cohesive use of space in gesture. McNeill and his colleagues (Cassell, McNeill, & McCullough, 1999;McNeill, Cassell, & McCullough, 1994) presented a video-recorded narrative to adult participants, who then re-told the story to a listener. In the stimulus narrative, the narrator set up two referents in the frontal space of the speaker with deictic gestures, and then linguistically referred back to one of the referents, but pointed to the wrong space (the space for the other referent) at the same time.…”

Lexical gestures and lexical access: a process model

“…The fourth major category is less easy to define and there is considerable disagreement among researcher as to their origins and functions. What we will call lexical gestures are similar to what have been called "representational gestures" (McNeill, Cassell, & McCollough, 1994), "gesticulations" (Kendon, 1980;Kendon, 1983), "ideational gestures" (Hadar, Burstein, Krauss, & Soroker, 1998;Hadar & Butterworth, 1997) and "illustrators" (Ekman & Friesen, 1972). Like motor gestures, lexical gestures occur only as accompaniments to speech, but unlike motor gestures they vary considerably in length, are nonrepetitive, complex and changing in form, and many appear to bear a meaningful relation to the semantic content of the speech they accompany.…”

“…In some cases, an attentive addressee will be able to interpret the gestural information (e.g., to discern that the case was both large and round), although the bulk of the gestures GSP4.2 July 30, 2001 Krauss, Chen & Got †esman -18 -speakers make are difficult to interpret staightforwardly (Feyereisen et al, 1988;Krauss, Morrel-Samuels, & Colasante, 1991). Evidence that viewers are able to do this (e.g., McNeill et al, 1994) really does not address the question of whether such gestures are communicatively intended.…”

Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: A review

“…Co-speech gestures and spoken language spontaneously occur together and both influence the understanding of a speaker's message (e.g. Goldin Meadow, 2003;Goldin Meadow, Kim, & Singer, 1999;Goldin Meadow & Momeni Sandhofer, 1999;McNeill, Cassell, & McCullough, 1994;Singer & Goldin Meadow, 2005). This strong coupling between gestures and speech has even led some to hypothesize that they belong to one integrated system of communication (e.g.…”