Gesture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2003

Two studies are reported that investigate how speakers use gesture in association with verbal ambiguity in two communicational situations characteristic of everyday talk. The first study uses a design that mimics a speaker’s self-repair initiated by the listener, while the second study involves speakers producing longer stretches of speech involving lexical ambiguity, without the listener interacting verbally with the speaker. The findings of both studies show that speakers do use gesture to clarify verbal ambiguity. Moreover, they suggest that the speaker’s awareness of a potential communication problem, and the fact that this communication problem is associated with the speech itself, are crucial variables influencing speakers’ gestural behaviour. Differences in the complexity of the form of the gestures are also observed and the theoretical implications of this are discussed. Overall, these studies provide important insights into semantic and pragmatic aspects of representational hand gestures and speech-gesture interaction in everyday talk.

This paper examines the intentionality of very young children’s communicative action by looking at interactional sequences that are touched off by a child’s point. Young children use points and vocalizations, including “proto words,” to orient to some feature of their situation in a manner that makes relevant a response by the caregiver. These gestures initiate interactional sequences through which the caregiver locates a candidate specification of the point’s target. The child’s point is oriented to by caregivers as a recognizable action directed to some end. We suggest that intentionality, is a feature of participants’ production and recognition of actions becomes visible in interaction between the child and the caregiver as it unfolds in a particular situation. The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

The article investigates resources used by parties in interaction to successfully complete each others’ utterances. Among the different ways in which recipients can demonstrate their understanding, collaborative completions are the most convincing since they display not only recipients’ understanding of the stance or the import of a turn-in-progress, but the minute analysis of the action itself. The article starts with a discussion of syntactic and action-sequential features of talk that can account for collaborative turn sequences and then focuses on other, non-verbal resources that may be made relevant at particular interactional junctures. An analysis of the several instances of collaborative completions illustrates the use of visually accessible features of the surround, gestural and postural conduct, and gaze direction in collaborative turn sequences. It is suggested that an interplay of these multiple modalities enables the participants to collaborate in co-constructing single syntactic units of talk. The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.