Gesture - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2016

Little is known about how individual signs that occur in naturally produced signed languages are recognized. Here we examine whether sign understanding may be grounded in sensorimotor properties by evaluating a signer’s ability to make lexical decisions to American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are articulated either congruent with or incongruent with the observer’s own handedness. Our results show little evidence for handedness congruency effects for native signers’ perception of ASL, however handedness congruency effects were seen in non-native late learners of ASL and hearing ASL-English bilinguals. The data are compatible with a theory of sign recognition that makes reference to internally simulated articulatory control signals — a forward model based upon sensory-motor properties of one’s owns body. The data suggest that sign recognition may rely upon an internal body schema when processing is non-optimal as a result of having learned ASL later in life. Native signers however may have developed representations of signs which are less bound to the hand with which it is performed, suggesting a different engagement of an internal forward model for rapid lexical decisions.

The aim of the present study was to examine the use of gestures in the narrative productions of preschool children. Both the developmental patterns of gestures and verbal production and the relationships between them were analysed. The participants included 45 preschool children, aged 38 to 71 months. The narrative competence of each child was assessed individually using a new storybook narrative task (the Narrative Competence Task). Each child’s performance was videotaped to assess both verbal and gestural productions. The results showed that the syntactic complexity and lexical variety in the children’s narratives increased with increasing age, whereas the number of gestures significantly decreased. Moreover, the number of gestures was positively associated with the proportion of utterances without verbs and negatively correlated with the proportion of complex utterances. Therefore, we could hypothesise that gestures can be used as a support in narrative construction by those children who are less proficient in syntactic skills.

This study examined the relationship between word frequency and timing of communicative gestures in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically-developing (TD) children. Nine children with SLI and twelve age-matched TD children produced a narrative after watching an animated cartoon. Redundant gesture-speech pairs were identified and coded for temporal alignment between gesture and speech onset and gesture duration. Word frequency for the co-occurring words was determined using the SUBTLEXus database. No significant group differences were found for temporal alignment or gesture duration. However, word frequency was associated with temporal alignment and gesture duration in TD children, but not in children with SLI. This finding suggests that the role communicative gestures play in lexical access may be different in children with SLI relative to TD children.

Adults regularly use word-gesture combinations in communication, and meaningful gestures facilitate word learning. However, it is not clear if this benefit of gestures is due to the speaker’s movement increasing the listener’s attention or if it needs to be a meaningful gesture, if the difficulty of the task results in disparate reliance on gestures, and if word classes are differentially affected by gestures. In the present research, participants were measured on their novel word learning across four gesture conditions: meaningful gesture, beat gesture, nonsense gesture, and no gesture with extended training (Study 1, n = 139) and brief training (Study 2, n = 128). Overall, meaningful gestures and high frequency words led to the highest word learning accuracy. This effect of word frequency did not hold true for beat gestures after brief training suggesting that adding rhythmic information — if not adding semantic information — may detract from word learning. This research highlights the importance of considering task difficulty when analyzing the effects of gestures.

Does being instructed to gesture encourage those with low gesture rates to produce more gestures? If participants do gesture more when asked to, do they produce the same kinds of gestures? Does this vary as a function of the type of discourse being produced? We asked participants to take part in three tasks, a quasi-conversational task, a spatial problem solving task, and a narrative task, in two phases. In the first they received no instruction, and in the second they were asked to gesture. The instruction to gesture did not change gesture rate or gesture type across phases. We suggest that while explicitly asking participants to gesture may not always achieve higher gesture rates, it also does not negatively impact natural behavior.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reportedly have difficulties in responding to bids for joint attention, notably in following pointing gestures. Previous studies have predominantly built on structured observation measures and predefined coding categories to measure children’s responsiveness to gestures. However, how these gestures are designed and what detailed interactional work they can accomplish have received less attention. In this paper, we use a multimodal approach to conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how educators design their use of pointing in interactions involving school-aged children with ASD or autistic features. The analysis shows that pointing had specific sequential implications for the children beyond mere attention sharing. Occasionally, the co-occurring talk and pointing led to ambiguities when a child was interpreting their interactional connotations, specifically when the pointing gesture lacked salience. The study demonstrates that the CA approach can increase understanding of how to facilitate the establishment of joint attention.

In this paper, we analyze single-handed hold gestures that convey either the height or the shape of an object. The analyses include (1) differentiating which parts of the hands are profiled in each gesture, (2) considering whether these parts are occluded by other fingers, and (3) deriving predictions from (1) and (2) with regard to what hand shape characteristics favor height or shape gestures. In a production experiment, we asked participants to indicate either the height of a small ball or its shape, using only the index finger and the thumb. As predicted, the middle, ring and little finger were more curled in for height gestures. For shape gestures, those three fingers were more raised. In two perception experiments, participants viewed virtual hands from a computer-generated continuum of hand-shape stimuli. We found that if the middle, ring and little finger were more curled in, participants were more likely to interpret a gesture as indicating height. Our results pose new questions with regard to the relation between the physical form of a gesture and the inferred imaginary forms that are involved in deriving meaning from a gesture.