What’s New? Gestures Accompany Inferable Rather Than Brand-New Referents in Discourse

Abstract

The literature on bimodal discourse reference has shown that gestures are sensitive to referents' information status in discourse. Gestures occur more often with new referents/ first mentions than with given referents/subsequent mentions. However, because not all new entities at first mention occur with gestures, the current study examines whether gestures are sensitive to a difference in information status between brand-new and inferable entities and variation in nominal definiteness. Unexpectedly, the results show that gestures are more frequent with inferable referents (hearer new but discourse old) than with brand-new referents (hearer new and discourse new). The findings reveal new aspects of the relationship between gestures and speech in discourse, specifically suggesting a complementary (disambiguating) function for gestures in the context of first mentioned discourse entities. The results thus highlight the multi-functionality of gestures in relation to speech.

Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground

“…On the other hand, accessible referents were the least often marked gesturally. This finding also seems to contrast with studies in adults (e.g., Debreslioska and Gullberg, 2020b ; Im and Baumann, 2020 ). However, this may be related to the fact that these referents are already active in the children’s mind and may be the most difficult category to assess their place in perspective-taking.…”

“…The current study presents some limitations in terms of annotation that prevent the results to be more directly compared to some previous investigations. Our study focuses only on referents that have been marked gesturally, while other studies (e.g., Debreslioska and Gullberg, 2020b ; Im and Baumann, 2020 ) consider all discourse referents, analyzing the frequency with which referents were marked by gestures. Despite that, we believe that the previously reported findings are complementary with ours.…”

“…In other words, it is believed that non-referential and pointing gestures will accompany speech with lower CD, and iconic gestures will accompany points of higher CD, as according to Givón (1985), "less predictable/accessible/continuous a topic is, the more coding material is used to represent it in the language (p. 197, as cited in McNeill, 1992)." Since then, a number of empirical studies involving adult speech have found that gestures tend to mark the introduction of either new referents (e.g., Marslen-Wilson et al, 1982;Levy and Fowler, 2000;Gullberg, 2003;Yoshioka, 2008;Debreslioska et al, 2013;Debreslioska and Gullberg, 2019) or accessible referents in discourse (Debreslioska and Gullberg, 2020b). Interestingly, Debreslioska et al (2013) mention that gestures may co-occur with given referents but are more likely to occur when the given referents are reintroduced (i.e., explicitly mentioned in previous discourse, but reactivated in the narrative with a full noun phrase), as opposed to a maintained given referent (i.e., easily accessible to the hearer and produced with a lexically reduced form such as a pronoun, or completely missing, i.e., zero anaphora).…”

“… Im and Baumann’s (2020) preliminary study investigated the multimodal marking of Referent Status in terms of both prosody and non-referential gesture in a two-and-a-half minute Ted Talk video. Much like Debreslioska and Gullberg (2020b) , the study used a precise annotation of referents containing four levels: new , unused (i.e., unique referents, such as “the Sun”), bridging (which corresponds to accessible referents from context), and given . Although their study did not carry out any statistical analyses, their results showed a tendency for non-referential gestures to mark more bridging (i.e., accessible), new, and unused referents than given referents.…”

Emerging ASL Distinctions in Sign-Speech Bilinguals' Signs and Co-speech Gestures in Placement Descriptions

“…Such utterances occur in specific discourse contexts, where the figure object is typically known information. Previous work has shown discourse context to affect gesture rate in non-signers (Debreslioska and Gullberg, 2020 ). We leave it for future research to determine whether L2 signers' and non-signers' gesture rates vary in a similar or different manner as a function of discourse context.…”