Article published in:
Gesture
Vol. 15:3 (2016) ► pp. 357–371

Do people gesture more when instructed to?

| Case Western Reserve University
| Case Western Reserve University
| Case Western Reserve University
| Case Western Reserve University
| Case Western Reserve University
Does being instructed to gesture encourage those with low gesture rates to produce more gestures? If participants do gesture more when asked to, do they produce the same kinds of gestures? Does this vary as a function of the type of discourse being produced? We asked participants to take part in three tasks, a quasi-conversational task, a spatial problem solving task, and a narrative task, in two phases. In the first they received no instruction, and in the second they were asked to gesture. The instruction to gesture did not change gesture rate or gesture type across phases. We suggest that while explicitly asking participants to gesture may not always achieve higher gesture rates, it also does not negatively impact natural behavior.
Keywords: gesture rate, methodology, instructed to gesture
Published online: 06 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.15.3.05par
References

References

Alibali, Martha W.
(2005) Gesture in spatial cognition: Expressing, communicating, and thinking about spatial information. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 5 (4), 307–331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beilock, Sian & Susan Goldin-Meadow
(2010) Gesture changes thought by grounding it in action. Psychological Science, 21 (11), 1605–1610. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Broaders, Sara C., Susan W. Cook, Zachary Mitchell, & Susan Goldin-Meadow
(2007) Making children gesture brings out implicit knowledge and leads to learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136 (4), 539–550. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Anne & J. Phillipe Rushton
(1978) Bodily communication and personality. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 17, 31–36. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chu, Mingyuan & Sotaro Kita
(2011) The nature of gestures’ beneficial role in spatial problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140 (1), 102–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Susan W., Terina K. Yip, & Susan Goldin-Meadow
(2010) Gesturing makes memories that last. Journal of Memory & Language, 63, 465–475. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Costa, Paul T. Jr., Antonio Terracciano, & Robert R. McCrae
(2001) Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (2), 322–331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Crasborn, Onno & Han Sloetjes
(2008) Enhanced ELAN functionality for sign language corpora. In Onno Crasborn, Thomas Hanke, Eleni Efthimiou, Inge Zwitserlood, & Ernst Thoutenhoofd (Eds.), Construction and exploitation of sign language corpora: 3rd workshop on the representation and processing of sign languages (pp. 39–43). Paris: ELDA.Google Scholar
Freleng, Isadore D.
. (Director) (1946) Baseball bugs [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Susan C. Levine, Elena Zinchenko, Terina K.Y. Yip, Naureen Hemani, & Laiah Factor
(2012) Doing gesture promotes learning a mental transformation task better than seeing gesture. Developmental Science, 15 (6), 876–884. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Judith
(2001) Status, gender, and nonverbal behavior in candid and posed photographs: A study of conversations between university employees. Sex Roles, 44 (11/12), 677–692. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) Nonverbal behavior, status, and gender: How do we understand their relations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 384–391. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Judith & Gregory B. Friedman
(1999) Status, gender, and nonverbal behavior: A study of structured interactions between employees of a company. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (9), 1082–1091. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Judith & Frank J. Bernieri
(2001) Interpersonal sensitivity: Theory and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Helweg-Larsen, Marie, Stephanie J. Cunningham, Amanda Carrico, & Alison Pergram
(2004) To nod or not to nod: An observational study of nonverbal communication and status in female and male college students. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28, 358–361. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Henley, Nancy M.
(1977) Body politics: Power, sex and nonverbal communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Hostetter, Autumn B., Kirsten Bieda, Martha W. Alibali, Mitchell Nathan, & Eric J. Knuth
(2006) Don’t just tell them, show them! Teachers can intentionally alter their instructional gestures. In Ron Sun (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1523–1528). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Martha W. Alibali
(2007) Raise your hand if you’re spatial: Relations between verbal and spatial skills and gesture production. Gesture, 7 (1), 73–95. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Andrea L. Potthoff
(2012) Effects of personality and social situation on representational gesture production. Gesture, 12 (1), 62–83. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Chuck
(Director) (1949) Fast and furrious [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar
(Director) (1949) For scent-imental reasons [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar
(Director) (1949) Feed the kitty [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar
Macedonia, Manuela & Katharina von Kriegstein
(2012) Gestures enhance foreign language learning. Biolinguistics, 6(3/4), 393–416.Google Scholar
McNeill, David
(1992) Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Parrill, Fey
(2010) Viewpoint in speech-gesture integration: Linguistic structure, discourse structure, and event structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25 (5), 650–668. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pika, Simone, Elena Nicoladis, & Paula Marentette
(2006) A cross-cultural study on the use of gestures: Evidence for cross-linguistic transfer? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (3), 319–327. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
So, Wing Chee
(2010) Cross-cultural transfer in gesture frequency in Chinese-English bilinguals. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25 (10), 1335–1353. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stevanoni, Elizabeth & Karen Salmon
(2005) Giving memory a hand: Instructing children to gesture enhances their recall. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 29 (4), 217–233. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Anders, Sari M.
(2013) Beyond masculinity: Testosterone, gender/sex, and human social behavior in a comparative context. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 34, 198–210. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vandenberg, Steven G. & Allan R. Kuse
(1978) Mental rotation, a group test of 3-D spatial visualization. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 47, 599–604. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wartenburger, Isabell, Esther Kühn, Uta Sassenberg, Manja Foth, Elizabeth A. Franz, & Elke van der Meer
(2010) On the relationship between fluid intelligence, gesture production, and brain structure. Intelligence, 38, 193–201. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Willems, Roel, Aslı Özyürek, & Peter Hagoort
(2006) When language meets action: The neural integration of gesture and speech. Cerebral Cortex, 17 (10), 2322–2333. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Cravotta, Alice, M. Grazia Busà & Pilar Prieto
2019. Effects of Encouraging the Use of Gestures on Speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62:9 ► pp. 3204 ff. Crossref logo
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Martha W. Alibali
2019. Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26:3 ► pp. 721 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.