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Gesture - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
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The silent order : Gestural emblems and symbolic meaning-making in Jordanian street coffee shops
Author(s): Muna Alalya, Aseel Zibin and Abdel Rahman Mitib AltakhainehAvailable online: 16 June 2026show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractThis study investigates non-verbal hand gestures used in street drive-thru coffee shops (gahwet taka:si) in Amman, Jordan, focusing on their role as stand-alone emblems for quick transactions. Integrating Symbolic Interactionism with theories of conventionalization and embodiment, the paper examines how meaning is negotiated between customers and employees through joint action. The methodology consisted of qualitative identification of the gestural lexicon through interviews and observation of 19 coffee shop employees, followed by quantitative validation with 71 participants. Qualitative analysis reveals pathways of conventionalization, including iconicity, pantomime, and shared cultural knowledge, which codify these movements into a system. Quantitative results indicate a high level of recognition among frequent visitors, suggesting that exposure and interaction frequency drive the acquisition of this gestural competence. This study demonstrates how gestures become codified within a commercial context, offering a real-world application of Symbolic Interactionism in understanding the development of an informal, culturally embedded transactional gesture system.
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How is multimodality used in early communication? : Relationships with pragmatic function, referential-specificity level, and grammar
Author(s): María Fernández-Flecha, María Blume and Andrea JunyentAvailable online: 05 June 2026show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractThis study assessed if early multimodality increasingly involves more mature productions, in a pragmatic (i.e., declaratives) and referential (i.e., words) sense, and if it is associated with grammar, which would point to multimodality’s role in language development. Data is derived from the spontaneous multimodal behaviours of 8-to-28-month-old Peruvian children, along with data collected with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). We found the production of multimodal behaviours that included words correlated positively (i) with age, an effect especially strong for declaratives, and (ii) with the spontaneous production of multiword utterances. Also, (iii) the production of multimodal behaviours correlated positively with the morphosyntactic complexity score (CDI), and (iv) multimodal behaviours involving vocalizations specifically correlated negatively with MLU (CDI). Therefore, early multimodality presents a language-oriented profile, increasingly favouring combinations with words and a declarative function, and correlating with multiword utterances, as well as with a more mature morphosyntactic profile.
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Arabic speakers gesture more than English speakers in a storytelling task
Author(s): Elena Nicoladis and Yasmine BoulosAvailable online: 05 June 2026show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractSome studies have shown cross-cultural differences in the frequency of representational gesture production. There have been anecdotal reports of Arabic speakers gesturing frequently in order to depict their message. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether Arabic speakers use more representational gestures than English speakers when telling a story. Secondarily, we tested whether that difference was mediated by story quality. We asked adults who spoke either Egyptian Arabic as a first language and English monolinguals to watch a cartoon and tell the story back. The Arabic speakers gestured significantly more than the English speakers. While story quality approached significance as an independent predictor of gesture production, we found no evidence that it mediated the cross-cultural difference. One interpretation of these results is that there are cultural norms for gesture frequency.
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Different embodied motivations converge in a single recurrent gesture : The Two-Handed-Alternation-Sagittal (2HAS) gesture
Author(s): Daiya Kuryu, Jordan Zlatev and Harry PolfeldtAvailable online: 05 June 2026show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractOver the past few decades, gesture researchers have shown growing interest in the idea that certain gestural forms are conventionally associated with fairly specific, yet not too narrow, semantic and pragmatic meanings. These gestures are referred to as recurrent gestures and are argued to be grounded in bodily experiences, including instrumental actions and movement patterns. In this paper, we first provide supporting evidence for the conventionalized status of the target kinetic pattern of this study — the Two-Handed Alternation gesture on the Sagittal axis (2HAS). We then demonstrate how two different types of embodied motivations, namely mimetic schemas (grounded in instrumental actions) and image schemas (grounded in bodily experiences of movement patterns), converge in the single recurrent kinetic pattern of 2HAS, giving rise to its various referential and pragmatic functions.
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Home position
Author(s): Harvey Sacks and Emanuel A. Schegloff
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Depicting by gesture
Author(s): Jürgen Streeck
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Some uses of the head shake
Author(s): Adam Kendon
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Pragmatic functions of gestures
Author(s): Adam Kendon
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