Gesture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2010

Why do speakers produce gestures? This study tests the hypothesis that gesture facilitates the conceptual planning of speaking, and in particular, gesture promotes thinking about perceptually present information. This view implies that, when gesture is prohibited, people should be less likely to speak about such information. We tested this prediction among children (N = 50) who solved and explained Piagetian conservation tasks. For one set of conservation tasks, all children were allowed to gesture. For a second set of tasks, some children were prohibited from gesturing by wearing a cloth muff. When children were prohibited from gesturing, they expressed more non-present information and less perceptually present information in their explanations than when allowed to gesture. Thus, gesture production appears to highlight or lend salience to perceptually present information. We argue that gesture helps speakers decide what to attend to and therefore what to say.

Negative structures are a characteristic of all human languages. One such structure is ‘node’ and ‘scope’ of negation. In an utterance, the node is the location of a negative form, and the scope is the stretch of language to which the negation applies. In this paper, I examine a gesture that English speakers perform when they negate and show how speakers organize the different phases of gestural action in relation to the negative structures in speech. In this gesture, speakers first bring one hand across their body (preparation phase). Then, with the palm turned down, they move their hand rapidly along the horizontal axis (stroke phase). Often, they hold their hand in space for a short period after the stroke (post-stroke hold phase), before returning it to rest (recovery phase). In several negative utterances, drawn from a corpus of audiovisual recordings of conversations in everyday settings, speakers prepared this gesture in advance of the node of negation, synchronized the stroke of the gesture with the node, and performed a post-stroke hold throughout the scope. I suggest that the grammatical concepts of node and scope can also account for the way speakers gesture when they negate. This study refines understanding of how gesture phrase structure functions and suggests a multimodal view of grammatical phenomena.

Our study aimed to examine longitudinally early development of gestures, object-actions (short for object-related-actions), word comprehension, and word production and their reciprocal relationships in typically developing infants. Twenty-two monolingual Italian infants were followed monthly from 0;10 up to 1;5 with the Italian short form of MacArthur-Bates CDI — Gestures and Words. Results showed that gestures, object-actions, and word comprehension increased significantly from 0;10 to 1;5, with an earlier development of gestures with respect to object-actions, while production started to increase significantly from 1;0. A developmental advantage of girls with respect to boys was found in gestures, object-actions and word comprehension. Relationships were evident between object-actions and word comprehension at all ages, between gestures and both word comprehension and word production in their phase of emergence, and between word comprehension and word production at the emergence of word production. Our findings suggest that gestures support the emergence of verbal abilities, while object-actions contribute to the construction of the representation of meanings.

This study investigated the production of spontaneous pointing gestures in 26 toddlers, who were observed during free play time at day nursery. Pointing gestures and their different features (e.g., handedness, vocalizations, form and function of gesture) were recorded for a total observation time of 100 hours. Results revealed that the vast majority of pointing gestures were right-handed and accompanied by vocalizations, emphasizing the tight interconnection between speech and gesture from an early stage of development. Whole-hand gestures were more frequently used in imperative contexts, whereas index extensions were more frequently produced in declarative ones. Moreover, the use of declarative gestures and index extensions were found to increase with age. Implications concerning the origins of imperative and declarative pointing are discussed.