The effect of immediate communicative function on the physical form of conversational hand gestures
Date
2003
Authors
Gerwing, Jennifer Jay
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Abstract
Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. This thesis investigated factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous (non-symbolic) action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This thesis presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the (symbolic) form of the gesture. First, I manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had not done the same actions (No Common Ground condition) or one who had (Common Ground condition). The former gestures were more precise and informative than the latter, which were less complex and "sloppier," a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, I used the given/new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The new information in each gesture was larger, clearer, or otherwise emphasized. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or sloppier, which is similar to findings for given versus new information with words. Thus these immediate communicative functions played a major role in determining the physical forms of the gestures.