Gesture - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2016

This paper examines the speech-accompanying gesture and other kinesic behaviour of bilingual English-Māori and monolingual English speakers in New Zealand. Physical expression has long been regarded a key component of Māori artistic and spoken performance, as well as in personal interactions. This study asks (1) if there are gestures more common to or exclusively employed by the Māori population of New Zealand and (2) if their frequency and form is influenced by speaking Māori? More generally, the study considers the effect of different languages on gesture within the same speaker. Four bilingual Māori and six monolingual New Zealanders of European ancestry were recorded providing similar narrations. We report three differences between the speaker groups: a prevalence among Māori speakers for flat-handed motion gestures, gestures of the head, and eyebrow flashes. The findings highlight the probabilistic nature of culturally-grounded variation in gesture and the appropriateness of sociolinguistic approaches to their study.

Although it is widely acknowledged that gestures are complex functional elements of human communication, many current functional classification systems are rather rigid, implicitly assuming gestures to perform only one function at any given time. In this paper, we present a theoretical view on the inherent multifunctionality of speakers’ gestures, inspired by frameworks in structural-functional linguistics (Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Hengeveld & Mackenzie’s Functional Discourse Grammar). Building upon this view, we report on a large-scale internet-based gesture perception study, designed in a way open to the potential for complex multifunctionality of gestural expression. The results provide quantitative support for the view that speakers’ gestures typically contribute to multiple semantic and meta-communicative functions of the ongoing discourse simultaneously. Furthermore, we identify clusters of functions that tend to be combined, as well as correlations between pairs of them. As a whole, this paper achieves some degree of convergence between ecological and experimental views on gesture functionality.

This paper presents a study of selected iconic gestures with a view to determining their effects on RT in a task-relevant and a task-irrelevant context. In two experiments, participants were presented with a coloured shape on a computer screen, a spoken statement referring to the presented shape, and a gesture that was task irrelevant. The findings from both experiments show strong support for the assumption that gesture processing is obligatory; irrelevant gestures affected speed of task performance. Furthermore the findings suggest that for slower, more cognitively controlled decisions incongruent gestures have an inhibitory effect, while for faster, more cognitively automated decisions congruent gestures have a facilitatory effect.

Closing argument represents the most crucial part of the adversarial system of justice. For attorneys, it provides an opportunity to showcase their persuasive skills through the full range of semiotic resources at their disposal. While studies of legal discourse have examined speech performance, few studies, if any, have analyzed how speech integrates with gesture and material conduct in the production of persuasive oratory. This work demonstrates the role of multimodal and material action in concert with speech and how an attorney employs hand movements, material objects, and speech to reinforce significant points of evidence for the jury. More theoretically, we demonstrate how beat gestures and material objects synchronize with speech to not only accentuate rhythm and foreground points of evidential significance but, at certain moments, invoke semantic imagery as well.