Nonverbal Behavior and Thought Processing

Gesture use in story recall by Chinese–English bilinguals

“…That is, gesture use may depend less on how well a speaker can speak the language and more on what a speaker is doing with language at a particular time. One possible reason for the inconsistent findings with regard to proficiency is that our study, like other previous studies (e.g., Marcos, 1979), assumed that the speakers were more proficient in their L1. In this study, that assumption corresponded to our impressions of the speakers' proficiency as represented on the videotapes.…”

An experimental investigation of the role of iconic gestures in lexical access using the tip‐of‐the‐tongue phenomenon

“…Experimental investigations have also consistently shown that words high in imageability are signi®cantly easier to recall than words low in imageability (Rubin & Friendly, 1986). Furthermore, there is evidence that imageability has an eåect on the production of gesture, where bilingual participants talking about high imagery topics produced more representational movements (similar to our iconic gestures) than any other type of gesture (Marcos, 1979). Pilot research by the present authors found that in a TOT state, high imageability target words were associated with a higher frequency of iconic gestures.…”

The role of gestures in description-communication: A cross-sectional study of aging

“…Second, this approach does not appear to be able to reconcile the absence of age effects in description quality with the presence of age effects in gesture usage, especially in the case of the descriptive gestures. And, third, the data obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 clearly come from a different mold than those reported by Marcos (1979) andFeyereisen (1983), and for this reason do not fit the pattern expected of attempted compensation. How, then, should our data be interpreted?…”