One measure of the communicative function of gestures is to test how speakers’ gestures are influenced by whether an addressee can see them or not, that is, by manipulating visibility between participants. We question traditional dependent variables (i.e., rate measures), suggesting that they may have been insufficient for capturing essential differences in the gestures speakers use in each condition. We propose that investigating the qualitative features of gestures is a more nuanced, and ultimately more informative approach. We examined how speakers distributed information between their gestures and words, testing whether this distribution was affected by the visibility of their addressee. Twenty pairs of undergraduates took part in conversations that were either face to face (n = 10) or on the telephone (n = 10). Each speaker described a drawing of an elaborate dress to the addressee. We used a semantic feature analysis to analyze descriptions of the dress’ skirt and assessed when words or gestures contributed information about five categories pertaining to features of the skirt’s unusual shape. Although speakers’ rates of gesturing and number of words did not vary significantly between conditions, speakers contributed more information and conveyed more categories in their gestures when the addressee would see them, while words carried the informational burden when addressees would not see the gestures (p’s < .001). These results suggest that gestures serve a communicative function. The semantic feature analysis is thus an example of how to explore gestures’ qualitative features within a quantitative paradigm.
2024. Gesturing for the Addressee. In The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies, ► pp. 579 ff.
Cohen, Cathy & Ciara R. Wigham
2019. A comparative study of lexical word search in an audioconferencing and a videoconferencing condition. Computer Assisted Language Learning 32:4 ► pp. 448 ff.
Bavelas, Janet, Jennifer Gerwing & Sara Healing
2014. Effect of Dialogue on Demonstrations: Direct Quotations, Facial Portrayals, Hand Gestures, and Figurative References. Discourse Processes 51:8 ► pp. 619 ff.
Gerwing, Jennifer & Anne Marie Landmark Dalby
2014. Gestures convey content: An exploration of the semantic functions of physicians’ gestures. Patient Education and Counseling 96:3 ► pp. 308 ff.
Rowbotham, Samantha, Judith Holler, Donna Lloyd & Alison Wearden
2014. Handling pain: The semantic interplay of speech and co-speech hand gestures in the description of pain sensations. Speech Communication 57 ► pp. 244 ff.
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