Although some studies have demonstrated that imagistic gestures do communicate significant amounts of information none have attempted to analyze the significance of that information for the linguistic account within which it is embedded. This study focuses on the semantic dimension size and in a corpus of narratives identifies every single instance of size information and identifies whether this size information is encoded in speech, in gesture, or in speech and gesture. Crucially, it considers the judged relative importance of each instance of size information. It was discovered that high importance size information was significantly more likely to be encoded in gesture rather than in speech, whereas low importance size information was more likely to be encoded in speech rather than in gesture. This suggests that speakers may vary what information is encoded gesturally, according to its salience for the overall meaning to be conveyed. This result has major implications for the conceptualization of how gesture and speech work together in everyday talk.
2024. Pragmatics, Utterance Meaning, and Representational Gesture,
Asalıoğlu, Esma Nur & Tilbe Göksun
2023. The role of hand gestures in emotion communication: Do type and size of gestures matter?. Psychological Research 87:6 ► pp. 1880 ff.
Nicol, Madeline M. & Nikole D. Patson
2022. The effect of gestures on the interpretation of plural references. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 34:4 ► pp. 454 ff.
McGuire, Laura & Geoffrey Beattie
2019. Talking green and acting green are two different things: An experimental investigation of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and low carbon consumer choice. Semiotica 2019:227 ► pp. 99 ff.
2017. Observing iconic gestures enhances word learning in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment. Journal of Child Language 44:6 ► pp. 1458 ff.
2016. Speaker’s Hand Gestures Can Modulate Receiver’s Negative Reactions to a Disagreeable Verbal Message. In Toward Robotic Socially Believable Behaving Systems - Volume I [Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 105], ► pp. 133 ff.
Maricchiolo, Fridanna, Augusto Gnisci, Marino Bonaiuto & Gianluca Ficca
2009. Effects of different types of hand gestures in persuasive speech on receivers’ evaluations. Language and Cognitive Processes 24:2 ► pp. 239 ff.
Holler, Judith & Rachel Stevens
2007. The Effect of Common Ground on How Speakers Use Gesture and Speech to Represent Size Information. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 26:1 ► pp. 4 ff.
Beattie, Geoffrey & Heather Shovelton
2006. A critical appraisal of the relationship between speech and gesture and its implications for the treatment of aphasia. Advances in Speech Language Pathology 8:2 ► pp. 134 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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