Do conversational hand gestures communicate?

Abstract

In 5 experiments, male and female undergraduates viewed gestures and tried to select the words that originally accompanied them; read interpretations of gestures* meanings and tried to select the words that originally had accompanied them; tried to recognize gestures they previously had seen, presented either with or without the accompanying speech; and assigned gestures and the accompanying speech to semantic categories. On all 4 tasks, performance was better than chance but markedly inferior to performance when words were used as stimuli. Judgments of a gesture's semantic category were determined principally by the accompanying speech rather than gestural form. It is concluded that although gestures can convey some information, they are not richly informative, and the information they convey is largely redundant with speech

Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: A review

“…These studies clearly indicate that co-speech gestures evoke semantic processing, a claim which had been debated in the literature before (Krauss et al, 1991;McNeill, 1992). However, a remaining question is how comparable the semantic processing evoked by hand gestures is to that of linguistic items such as words.…”

“…Interestingly, these hand actions are almost never used without language. Consequently, they do not have a clear meaning outside of a language context, that is, people do not unambiguously recognize the intended meaning of co-speech gestures without speech (Krauss, Morrel Samuels, & Colasante, 1991). Co-speech gestures are a core example of the interrelatedness of action and language since without language, they tend to lose their meaning.…”

Lexical gestures and lexical access: a process model

“…Gestures that are unseen (e.g., made while speaking on the telephone) cannot convey information, and yet speakers make them. 12 In addition, experimental findings suggest that on average lexical gestures convey relatively little information (Feyereisen et al, 1988;Krauss, et al, 1991, experiments 1 and 2), that their contribution to the semantic interpretation of the utterance is negligible (Krauss et al, 1991, experiment 5), and that having access to them does not enhance the effectiveness of communication, as that is indexed by a referential communication task (Krauss et al, 11This is often the case with deictic gestures. For example, a speaker may say "You want to go through that door over there," and point at the particular door.…”

“…Note that in Kendon's example, the speaker elected to incorporate the feature LARGE (which could have been represented gesturally) but not ROUND in the verbal message. In some cases, an attentive addressee will be able to interpret the gestural information (e.g., to discern that the case was both large and round), although the bulk of the gestures GSP4.2 July 30, 2001 Krauss, Chen & Got †esman -18 -speakers make are difficult to interpret staightforwardly (Feyereisen et al, 1988;Krauss, Morrel-Samuels, & Colasante, 1991). Evidence that viewers are able to do this (e.g., McNeill et al, 1994) really does not address the question of whether such gestures are communicatively intended.…”

“…Viewers will disagree about the "meanings" they impute to gestures, even when viewing them along with the accompanying speech. 17 In the absence of speech, their imputed meanings evidence little iconicity (Feyereisen et al, 1988;Krauss et al, 1991).…”