“I see what you mean”: Oral deaf individuals benefit from speaker's gesturing

Abstract

Recent studies in the psychological literature reveal that cospeech gestures facilitate the construction of an articulated mental model of an oral discourse by hearing individuals. In particular, they facilitate correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at the expense of memory for discourse verbatim. Do gestures accompanying an oral discourse facilitate the construction of a discourse model also by oral deaf individuals trained to lip-read? The atypical cognitive functioning of oral deaf individuals leads to this prediction. Experiments 1 and 2, each conducted on 16 oral deaf individuals, used a recollection task and confirmed the prediction. Experiment 3, conducted on 36 oral deaf individuals, confirmed the prediction using a recognition task.When people talk, they make spontaneous movement of arms, hands, and heads, called cospeech gestures. These gestures are closely time-locked to the syntactic and semantic properties of speech. McNeill (1992) identifies a number of different types of cospeech gestures: iconic gestures, which capture aspects of the semantic content of speech; metaphoric gestures, which convey abstract pictorial content; beat gestures, which occur along with the rhythmical pulsation of speech; and deictic or pointing gestures, which indicate entities in the conversation. A series of experimental studies suggest that cospeech gestures have a role both for the speaker, because they favour the organisation of thinking (e.g.

Learning from text benefits from enactment

“…In line with such view, we argue that co-speech gestures, which are spatial in nature, convey information that can be easily incorporated into the text/discourse mental model because mental models themselves are spatially organized (Knauff & Johnson-Laird, 2002); moreover, gestures are cast in the same non-discrete representational format as mental models. Previous studies have shown that co-speech gestures performed by the speaker facilitate the construction of an articulated mental model by the listener (Cutica & Bucciarelli, 2008, 2011; this also holds for oral deaf individuals trained to lip-read: Vendrame, Cutica & Bucciarelli, 2010). A better mental model results in a greater number of correct recollections and correct inferences drawn from the information explicitly contained in the discourse, and poorer retention of surface information (verbatim).…”

Gesture–Speech Integration in Typical and Atypical Adolescent Readers

“…Comprehension of co-speech gestures has been researched more extensively in DHH individuals than comprehension of other gesture types because of their supporting role in language processing (Krauss et al, 1991;McNeill, 1994;Kelly et al, 2010b). In oral-deaf individuals who tend to be born to hearing parents and learn to communicate orally and to read words on the lips of the speakers (Vendrame et al, 2010), gestures accompanying discourse facilitate retention of content information and correct inferences. However, co-speech gestures interfere with verbatim memory for discourse in these individuals.…”