Gesture - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2007

This study asked whether: (1) adults process representational gesture and (2) gesture is remembered over time. Forty-five college students (ages 22–38) were each randomly assigned to watch a set of Speech Only and Speech + Gesture video stimuli (containing statements that were extracted from social conversation) either in an immediate or delayed condition. After watching the videotape, participants were asked to write recollections of the video stimuli either immediately after watching the videotape or thirty minutes later. We found that gesture was processed along with speech and that unlike speech, it was less likely to deteriorate over time. Moreover, speech stimuli that were accompanied by gesture were significantly more likely to be recalled than speech stimuli occurring without gesture. These results suggest that gesture is processed by adults along with speech during communication and that gesture might have a different status in memory than speech.

Studies of primate premotor cortex, and, in particular, of the so-called “mirror system” suggest a double hand/mouth motor command system that may have evolved initially in the context of ingestion, and later formed a platform for combined manual and vocal communication. In humans, manual gesture, when it accompanies speech, is tightly integrated with speech production. Speech production itself is influenced by executing or observing transitive actions, and manual actions also play an important role in language development in children, from the babbling stage onwards. Behavioural data reported here even show a reciprocal influence between word and symbolic gestures. Studies employing neuroimaging and repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) techniques suggest that the system governing both speech and gesture is located in Broca’s area.

This article investigates the rhythmic relationship between gesture and speech. Four subjects were filmed in natural conversations with friends. From the resulting videos, several thousand time-stamped annotations pertaining to rhythm were manually recorded in a digital annotation tool, and exported for statistical analysis. They revealed a rich rhythmic relationship between the hands, head, and voice. Each articulator produced pikes (a general term for short, distinctive expressions, regardless of the modality) in complex synchrony with other articulators. Even eyeblinks were synchronized, with eyelids held closed until reopening on the rhythmic beat, akin to a pre-stroke hold before a gestural stroke. Average tempos similar to previously reported natural human tempos — e.g. Fraisse’s (1982) 600 ms figure — were found in hands, head, and speech, although hands tended to move most quickly and speech most slowly. All three also shared a common tempo of around a third of a second, perhaps to synchronize inter-articulator meeting points. These findings lend empirical weight to earlier observations of a rhythmic relationship between gesture and speech, providing support for the theory of a common cognitive origin of the two modalities.

Despite the growing body of research concerned with talk and interaction in institutional settings, the ways in which complex forms of organisational activity are accomplished in and through gesture remain relatively neglected. In this paper, we consider auctions of fine art and antiques and examine the ways in which auctioneers deploy an organisation that creates competition and enables the price of goods to be rapidly escalated in a systematic and transparent manner. We explore the ways in which gesture and other forms of bodily conduct are used, with and within talk, to elicit, juxtapose and publicly reveal the actions of potential buyers and enable participants to have a sense of the source and integrity of the various contributions. We consider how the gesturing hands serve to engender specific actions and how they are transformed in the course of their articulation to respond to the contribution, or absence of contribution, of bidders. In various ways therefore, the paper is concerned with addressing how gesture and other forms of bodily conduct are interactionally articulated with talk so as to accomplish a highly specialised and contingent form of organisational activity; an activity that enables price to be rapidly escalated and the sale of goods to be witnessed by an audience on the fall of a hammer.

The full-bodied, multi-faceted use of gesture by Italy’s beloved vaudeville and cinema comedian Antonio De Curtis, in art Totò, is rooted in the rich gesture language of Naples. Totò’s humble origins, the experience of poverty and deprivation, conditioned his art, as did his immersion as a mere child into the rough-and-tumble world of Neapolitan street theater. The teeming neighborhoods of Naples, a Baroque city, have made it into somewhat of a theatrum mundi, producing many fine actors and playwrights. The essay, illustrated by photograms from a few of Totò’s films, suggests that Neapolitan gesture, whose purpose is communication, is stylized by Totò and transformed into artistry of a high order.