Gesture - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2007

The article discusses one of the most ancient and unique customs in Jewish liturgy — the hand movements that accompany the Torah recital ritual in the Yemenite Jewish tradition. They are usually perceived as connected to the melody path of the recital: as a technique for its memorization and performance. For the first time, these movements and the technique of their performance are being recorded, classified and described in a systematic scholar way, particularly in terms of anthropokinesics and task dynamics. Their connection is discussed to other elements and techniques of the ritual. The gestures have been studied in two major frameworks: Torah learning in a children’s religious class, and Torah recital in the synagogue. The article argues that the recital gestures function as a kind of body technique, whose cultural, symbolic, aesthetic and psycho-dynamic significance reaches much farther than memorization of the recital melody.

In this paper, I compare three different assumptions about the relationship between speech, thought and gesture. These assumptions have profound consequences for theories about the representations and processing involved in gesture and speech production. I associate these assumptions with three simplified processing architectures. In the Window Architecture, gesture provides us with a ‘window into the mind’. In the Language Architecture, properties of language have an influence on gesture. In the Postcard Architecture, gesture and speech are planned by a single process to become one multimodal message. The popular Window Architecture is based on the assumption that gestures come, as it were, straight out of the mind. I argue that during the creation of overt imagistic gestures, many processes, especially those related to (a) recipient design, and (b) effects of language structure, cause an observable gesture to be very different from the original thought that it expresses. The Language Architecture and the Postcard Architecture differ from the Window Architecture in that they both incorporate a central component which plans gesture and speech together, however they differ from each other in the way they align gesture and speech. The Postcard Architecture assumes that the process creating a multimodal message involving both gesture and speech has access to the concepts that are available in speech, while the Language Architecture relies on interprocess communication to resolve potential conflicts between the content of gesture and speech.

Several manuscripts of Terence feature a cycle of miniatures depicting masked actors. The miniatures mark scene-headings and on this account have often been dismissed as merely decorative and irrelevant to the history of ancient theater. Nevertheless, the pictures project an illusion of theatricality so irresistible and lively, that it is hardly possible that the illustrated Terence does not reflect some sort of performance practice. This paper focuses on the code of gesture depicted in the miniatures and examines its relationship with late revivals of literary drama. I first discuss the iconographic and textual evidence pertaining to the date of the prototype of the miniatures; I then examine Quintilian’s remarks on dramatic gesture in order to outline the code he associated with the stage. This outline serves as a comparandum for the typology of gestures depicted in the Parisian codex of Terence (B.N. 7899), which is based on an analysis of the set of hand positions used to illustrate the Andria. (A glossary decoding the gestures of the Andria and comparing them with both hand positions from Quintilian’s catalogue and those known from earlier iconography is appended to the end of this paper.) The results of this comparison, along with some observations on the artist’s technique, suggest an answer to the question of which (if any) performance practice the miniatures could reflect.

Individuals differ greatly in how often they gesture when they speak. This study investigated relations between speakers’ verbal and spatial skills and their gesture rates. Two types of verbal skill were measured: semantic fluency, which is thought to index efficiency with lexical access, and phonemic fluency, which is thought to index efficiency with organizing the lexicon in novel ways. Spatial skill was measured with a visualization task. We hypothesized that individuals with low verbal skill but high spatial visualization skill would gesture most often, due to having mental images not closely linked to verbal forms. This hypothesis was supported for phonemic fluency, but not for semantic fluency. We also found that individuals with low phonemic fluency and individuals with high phonemic fluency produced representational gestures at higher rates than individuals with average phonemic fluency. The findings indicate that individual differences in gesture production are associated with individual differences in cognitive skills.

Considerable attention has been paid in the CA literature to the glossing practices through which participants in conversation formulate who they are, what they are talking about, where the things they are talking about are located, and so forth. There are, of course, gestural glossing practices as well. For any concept or category presented gesturally, however, there is a range of possibilities from which a particular formulation may be adopted on any actual occasion of use. Identifying alternative formulations serves as a useful analytic exercise for exploring the pragmatic consequences of a produced gesture. In our own research, we have been studying the practices through which surgeons provide instruction while performing surgeries in a teaching hospital. We describe here a particular anatomy lesson produced during a surgery. The attending surgeon uses his hands and arms to gesturally construct a representation of a specific anatomic region (“the Triangle of Doom”) for the benefit of two medical students viewing and participating in the surgery. Employing the structure of Schegloff’s analysis of place formulations, we conduct an analysis of the attending’s gestural formulation. We will show how analyzing a particular gesture in this way illuminates both the intricate ways in which the gesture is tied to its context of production and the exquisite specificity of the gesture itself.