Gesture - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2011

Previous research on the use of head nods in talk-in-interaction has demonstrated that they can be used for various interactional purposes by speakers and recipients in different sequential positions. In this report, I examine speakers’ uses of nods in “third position”, in the course of “minimal post-expansions” (Schegloff, 2007). I identify three possible distinct types of nods. The first of these can be used to register a prior utterance as news; the second appears to be designed to register receipt of a prior utterance without treating it as news; and the third embodies features of the first two types, and may be designed to register receipt and acknowledgment of “dispreferred” news. These findings are suggestive of rich complexities in the use of head movements in the production of actions-in-interaction, and of the importance of a fine-grained analytic approach for understanding their situated uses.

Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that language typology influences how people gesture when using ‘manner-of-motion’ verbs (Kita 2000; Kita & Özyürek 2003) and that this is due to ‘online’ lexical and syntactic choices made at the time of speaking (Kita, Özyürek, Allen, Brown, Furman & Ishizuka, 2007). This paper attempts to relate these findings to the co-speech iconic gesture used by an English speaker with conduction aphasia (LT) and five controls describing a Sylvester and Tweety1 cartoon. LT produced co-speech gesture which showed distinct patterns which we relate to different aspects of her language impairment, and the lexical and syntactic choices she made during her narrative.

The present study investigates the functions of gestures in preschoolers’ descriptions of activities. Specifically, utilizing McNeill’s growth point theory (1992), I examine how gestures contribute to the creation of contrast from the immediate context in the spoken discourse of children. When preschool children describe an activity consisting of multiple actions, like playing on a slide, they often begin with the central action (e.g., sliding-down) instead of with the beginning of the activity sequence (e.g., climbing-up). This study indicates that, in descriptions of activities, gestures may be among the cues the speaker uses for forming a next idea or for repairing the temporal order of the activities described. Gestures may function for the speaker as visual feedback and contribute to the process of utterance formation and provide an index for assessing language development.

The present study aimed to describe language development in children with Down syndrome, focussing on the relationships between gestural and vocal communication. The individual developmental trajectories of gesture production and its predictive role on later language development were analysed in a group of children with Down syndrome. Eight two-year-old children were followed for a two-year period until they reached the age of four years old. With regard to the developmental trends, two distinct patterns were found. Some children showed an increasing profile of gesture production, whereas others showed an inverted U-shaped profile or a stable production of gestures. Only the children in the second group showed a remarkable growth in their lexical abilities. Moreover, gesture production was identified as a reliable predictor of later vocabulary size when children were both 24 and 36 months old, and the production of crossmodal transitional forms (i.e., gesture-word associations) appeared to be a significant predictive index of their later two-word production.

This paper describes the emergence of a quotable gesture for HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The gesture has its origin in the Zulu phrase amangama amathathu ‘the three letters’, an expression South Africans began to use from the mid-1990s to refer to the acronym HIV. This phrase generated a plethora of words and phrases for HIV using the concept of ‘three’. With these spoken references, speakers would sometimes use a manual expression for ‘three’ by showing three extended fingers. With repeated use, the manual expression by itself came to be established as a quotable gesture for HIV. The gesture became independent of speech as a noticeable increase in the number of deaths from HIV occurred. From observations of use in every day situations, speakers use the gesture primarily to mitigate the crude or indelicate effect of directly saying a person has HIV in speech. Use of the gesture also demonstrates sensitivity and empathy on the part of the speaker and lessens the speaker’s commitment to, and consequently their responsibility for suggesting a person has the disease. Whether for secret communication or openly displayed for dramatic effect, speakers use this gesture in conjunction with speech in nuanced ways to avoid breaking the spoken taboo and flouting social norms. The emergence of this gesture suggests that speech taboos are a key reason for gestures becoming quotable; hence the large number of quotable gestures that represent socially awkward and potentially offensive words and speech acts. The adaptation of a counting gesture demonstrates that one source for new quotable gestures may be the re-semanticization of an existing gesture through spoken semantic links. In the case of the HIV gesture, spoken language played a key role in disseminating the metonym of ‘three’ and establishing a common ground for a quotable gesture to emerge across many communities in South Africa.