Effects of linguistic context on the acceptability of co-speech gestures

Abstract

We ask whether iconic co-speech gestures are judged as more natural by naive participants when their content is entailed by a preceding context, or repeated in the same utterance, or when they contribute new information (i.e., are nontrivial). Our results show, first, that the acceptability of co-speech gestures is not affected by whether they are entailed by a preceding context (they are not "hard presupposition triggers"). In contrast, our second finding is that gestures are affected by content in the same utterance, such that they are judged more acceptable when they reinforce information already present in the proposition. In addition, gestures varied widely in how acceptable they were judged even in the same information contexts, which we take to be an indication that we are just scratching the surface of a more general question about the felicity of co-speech gestures, of which the current study provides a first experimental foundation.

Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus

“…The overall mean for the Gestural Contrast examples is quite low (39.1), but it's a little bit hard to interpret, since we don't have a baseline for ordinary presuppositions (including triggers that are typically considered weak and those that are typically considered strong) or supplements. Furthermore, the overall mean for the baseline Verbal Contrast examples is also quite low (53.6), which brings to mind the findings in Zlogar & Davidson (2018) that examples with co-speech gestures in general have lower acceptability ratings than their counterparts without co-speech gestures. In other words, the acceptability rating baseline for examples with co-speech gestures as such can be quite low to begin with.…”

“…Following the practice in Zlogar & Davidson (2018), who also observed a lot of variation across items, below I report the mean ratings within different example sets for methodological reasons, since these data could be helpful for subsequent experiments on gestures. Figure 4 shows the mean ratings across all participants for the sets of examples used in the experiment (see the list of examples in Appendix B).…”

Composition and projection of co-speech gestures

“…There has been a recent upsurge in studying how content-bearing gestures contribute to the meaning of otherwise spoken utterances from the perspective of formal semantics and pragmatics (Ebert & Ebert 2014;Ebert 2017;Tieu, Pasternak, Schlenker & Chemla 2017, 2018Hunter 2018;Schlenker 2018a,b;Zlogar & Davidson 2018;Esipova 2019, a.o.). Much of this research has been tackling the problem of gesture projection, i.e., if and how gestures come to be interpreted outside the semantic scope of various operators (negation, conditional and question operators, modals, quantifiers, etc.…”

The role of gesture in the English ish-construction

“…Wide variability in acceptance of co-speech gestures appears to be a common finding. In a perception task, Zlogar and Davidson (2018) test whether co-speech gestures can serve as hard presupposition triggers and whether utterance-internal content influences acceptability. They find that co-speech gestures are not hard presupposition triggers, and that utterance acceptability is influenced by whether the co-speech gesture reinforces the content in the utterance.…”

“…Recent work in multiple subfields of linguistics has investigated the role of gesture in spoken languages. For example, semanticists have been making inquiries into what meaning CO-SPEECH GESTURES contribute to an utterance (Esipova 2019, Tieu et al 2018, Zlogar and Davidson 2018. At the same time, variationist sociolinguists have been exploring the role of EMBODIMENT in structuring linguistic variation and what social meaning is conveyed by embodiment , Voight et al 2016.…”