The Communicative Value of Conversational Hand Gesture

Krauss, Robert M.; Dushay, Robert A.; Chen, Yihsiu; Rauscher, Frances H.

doi:10.1006/jesp.1995.1024

Cited by 123 publications

(93 citation statements)

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“…Speakers gesture more often when speaking to a listener face to face than when speaking alone (Cohen, 1977;Krauss, Dushay, Chen, & Rauscher, 1995; but see Bavelas & Healing, 2013, for a review). It is possible that gestures produced in these two situations may be generated from different mechanisms.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-thought and co-speech gestures are generated by the same action generation process.

Chu

Kita

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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People spontaneously gesture when they speak (co-speech gestures) and when they solve problems silently (co-thought gestures). In this study, we first explored the relationship between these 2 types of gestures and found that individuals who produced co-thought gestures more frequently also produced co-speech gestures more frequently (Experiments 1 and 2). This suggests that the 2 types of gestures are generated from the same process. We then investigated whether both types of gestures can be generated from the representational use of the action generation process that also generates purposeful actions that have a direct physical impact on the world, such as manipulating an object or locomotion (the action generation hypothesis). To this end, we examined the effect of object affordances on the production of both types of gestures (Experiments 3 and 4). We found that individuals produced co-thought and co-speech gestures more often when the stimulus objects afforded action (objects with a smooth surface) than when they did not (objects with a spiky surface). These results support the action generation hypothesis for representational gestures. However, our findings are incompatible with the hypothesis that co-speech representational gestures are solely generated from the speech production process (the speech production hypothesis).

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-thought and co-speech gestures are generated by the same action generation process.

Chu

Kita

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…Interestingly, Alibali et al (2001, p. 184) when discussing conflicting effects of visibility on gesture rate per word, observe that ''[a]mong visibility studies, those that have demonstrated effects of visibility on gesture production (e.g., Cohen, 1977;Cohen & Harrison, 1973;Krauss, Dushay, Chen, & Rauscher, 1995) used tasks with high spatial content (giving directions, describing abstract figures), which may have elicited primarily representational gestures''. This suggestion nicely ties in with our findings obtained with the Greeble objects, which are both highly spatial and abstract.…”

Section: On the Effects Of Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction in gesture during the production of repeated references

Hoetjes

Koolen

Goudbeek

et al. 2015

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tIn dialogue, repeated references contain fewer words (which are also acoustically reduced) and fewer gestures than initial ones. In this paper, we describe three experiments studying to what extent gesture reduction is comparable to other forms of linguistic reduction. Since previous studies showed conflicting findings for gesture rate, we systematically compare two measures of gesture rate: gesture rate per word and per semantic attribute (Experiment I). In addition, we ask whether repetition impacts the form of gestures, by manual annotation of a number of features (Experiment I), by studying gradient differences using a judgment test (Experiment II), and by investigating how effective initial and repeated gestures are at communicating information (Experiment III). The results revealed no reduction in terms of gesture rate per word, but a U-shaped reduction pattern for gesture rate per attribute. Gesture annotation showed no reliable effects of repetition on gesture form, yet participants judged gestures from repeated references as less precise than those from initial ones. Despite this gradient reduction, gestures from initial and repeated references were equally successful in communicating information. Besides effects of repetition, we found systematic effects of visibility on gesture production, with more, longer, larger and more communicative gestures when participants could see each other. We discuss the implications of our findings for gesture research and for models of speech and gesture production.

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“…For example, speakers gesture when their listener's cannot see them, albeit somewhat less than they do when they are visually accessible (Cohen, 1977;Cohen & Harrison, 1972;Krauss et al, 1995). Gestures that are unseen (e.g., made while speaking on the telephone) cannot convey information, and yet speakers make them.…”

Section: Conceptualizer Vs Working Memory Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%