Gesture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2001

We present our work on the temporal integration of hierarchies of communicative actions: kinesic, prosodic and discursive. We use the device of the ‘catchment’ as the locus around which this integration proceeds. We present a detailed case study of a gesture and speech elicitation experiment in which a subject describes her living space to an interlocutor. First, we process the video data to obtain the motion traces of both of the subject’s hands using the vector coherence mapping algorithm. We code the gestures to identify the catchments. We recover discourse purposes utilizing a system of guided questions. Finally, we define prosody in terms of the ToBI system. The results of these analyses are compared against the computed motion traces to identify the cues accessible in the gestural and audio data that correlate well with the psycholinguistic analyses. The results show that motion, prosody and discourse structure are integrated at each moment of speaking.The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

This study explores the conceptual and communicative roles of gesture by examining the consequences of gesture prevention for the type of spatial language used to solve a spatial problem. English speakers were asked to describe where to place a group of blocks so that the blocks completely filled a puzzle grid. Half the subjects were allowed to gesture and half were prevented from gesturing. In addition, half the subjects could see their addressee and half could not. Addressee visibility affected how reliant subjects were on specifying puzzle grid co-ordinates, regardless of gesture condition. When describing block locations, subjects who were allowed to gesture were more likely to describe block orientation and rotation, but only when they could see the addressee. Further, gesture and speech complemented each other such that subjects were less likely to lexically specify rotation direction when this information was expressed by gesture; however, this was not a deliberate communicative choice because subjects who were not visible to their addressee also tended to leave rotation direction unspecified when they gestured. Finally, speakers produced deictic anaphoric constructions (e.g., “turn it this way”) which referred to their own gestures only when they could see the addressee. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that gesture is both an act of communication and an act of thought, and the results fail to support the hypothesis that gesture functions primarily to facilitate lexical retrieval.

This paper presents evidence of non-manual gestures in American Sign Language (ASL). The types of gestures identified are identical to non-manual, spontaneous gestures used by hearing non-signers which suggests that the gestures co-occurring with ASL signs are borrowings from hearing culture. A comparison of direct quotes in ASL with spontaneous movements of hearing non-signers suggests a history of borrowing and eventual grammaticization in ASL of features previously thought to be unique to signed languages. The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visial data.

In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated consequences of this taboo on the Ghanaian gestural practice by observing gestures produced during naturalistic situations of giving route directions. First, there is a politeness convention to place the left hand on the lower back, as if to hide it from the interlocutor. Second, as a consequence of left-hand suppression, right-handed pointing may involve an anatomically staining position when indicating a leftward direction across the body. Third, pointing is sometimes performed with both hands together, which does not violate the taboo. Despite the taboo, left-handed pointing is not suppressed fully. Left-handed pointing gestures occur in association with the verbalization of the concept LEFT, suggesting the embodied nature of the concept. In addition, it is noteworthy that there is a class of left-handed gestures, which are so reduced in form that Ghanaians do not consider them as pointing for the purpose of the taboo.