Why Gesture

Summary of Gesture Studies

The study of gesture has been a rapidly growing field since the 20th century, particularly in relation to its role in speech. Susan Goldin-Meadow describes gestures as a "window on the mind" that frequently reflect an imagistic version of spoken content (Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture, 2007).

Aristotle's Framework Applied to Gesture

Aristotle distinguished between efficient cause (what causes an action) and final cause (the purpose of an action). In the case of walking, the efficient cause is the metabolic and muscular system, while the final cause is maintaining health. Similarly, this study explores what gesture is for (Church et al., 2017, p. 4).

Thematic Structure of Gesture Research

The book is structured around four key themes:

1. Biological, psychological, and social interpretations of gesture (Church et al., 2017, p. 397).
2. Gesture function across different time frames—moment-to-moment, ontogenetic (developmental), and evolutionary (Church et al., 2017, p. 397).
3. Varied methodologies for studying gestures (Church et al., 2017, p. 397).
4. Gesture functions not only for the producer but also for the observer—"gesture supports speech to enhance internal activities of the speaker, such as thinking and language production, while simultaneously supporting speech to enhance communication to listeners, influencing the listener’s thinking and language comprehension" (Church et al., 2017, p. 398).

Neurological and Psychological Evidence

Gesture appears to be linked with language in ways that enhance the communication of spatial information in speech (Alibali et al., Chapter 2; Ozyurek, Chapter 3). Similarly, in problem-solving contexts, gesture reflects action in a simulated form (Hostetter & Boncoddo, Chapter 7; Nathan, Chapter 8) (Church et al., 2017, p. 401).

Growth Point Theory (GPT)

McNeill and Lopez-Ozieblo’s Growth Point Theory (GPT) outlines three key aspects of gesture:

1. Gesture and speech are synchronised.
2. Gestures are holistic, three-dimensional, and imagistic, whereas speech is analytic, two-dimensional, and linear.
3. Because the formats of gesture and speech are distinct, their combination results in a more complete version of an idea than either modality alone (Church et al., 2017, p. 401).

Gesture as More Than a Redundant Supplement to Speech

De Ruiter argues that speech influences gesture and that gesture serves as "supplemental information that is redundant with speech" (Church et al., 2017, p. 402). However, the research in this book suggests that speech and gesture are mutually influential, and that "gesture content mirrors speech content, but because gesture’s format is three-dimensional and nonlinear, it is never fully redundant with speech" (Church et al., 2017, p. 403).

Gestures are also linked to embodied cognition—"our understanding of concepts may be grounded in the way we physically interact with the world, which is reflected in the way we gesture about the world" (Cook & Fenn, Chapter 6; Hostetter et al., Chapter 7; Nathan, Chapter 8) (Church et al., 2017, p. 403).

Gesture as a Unique Form of Action

Gestures represent information about interactions with the world but do not directly affect the world—"they represent information about a direct effect on the world without having a direct effect on the world" (Church et al., 2017, p. 404).

Novack and Goldin-Meadow (Chapter 17) suggest that gesturing about acting on objects is more likely to lead to generalisation and retention than actually acting on objects (Church et al., 2017, p. 404).

Gesture as an Evolutionary and Cognitive Tool

Gesture is thought to have evolved as either a precursor to spoken language (Bates & Dick, 2002; Corballis, 2002; Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998; Tomasello, 2008) or in tandem with it (McNeill, 2012). There are also short-term effects of gesture on moment-to-moment cognitive processing—when faced with spatial and motoric tasks, speakers produce more representational gestures (Church et al., 2017, p. 406).

Gesture’s Role in Language Processing

Representational gestures help speakers package information for speech. Gesture’s format differs from speech—"distinct meanings converge into a single, synthetic gesture," whereas "speech is analytic and combinatorial, in the sense that the meaning of the whole depends on the meanings of individual elements" (Alibali, 2005) (Church et al., 2017, p. 407).

This study applies Kita’s Information Packaging Hypothesis, which suggests that gesture helps speakers organise rich spatio-motoric information into packages suitable for speaking (Kita, 2000, p. 163). According to Kita, spatial-motoric thought provides "an alternative informational organisation that is not readily accessible to analytic thinking" (Church et al., 2017, p. 407).

Gesture and Speech as a Bidirectional Process

Kita and Özyürek’s Interface Model holds that gesture and speech production processes are linked bidirectionally. "Through this process, gesture and speech converge in content; more specifically, gestures encode information equivalent to the information speech encodes within a processing unit for utterance formation" (Mol & Kita, 2012) (Church et al., 2017, p. 408).

This contrasts with two other theories:

1. Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis – Gestures facilitate speakers’ retrieval of lexical items by activating spatial-dynamic features of concepts (Krauss, Chen, & Gottesman, 2000).
2. Image Activation Hypothesis – Gestures help maintain activation of mental images while they are being encoded into speech (de Ruiter, 1998; Wesp et al., 2001) (Church et al., 2017, p. 409).

Experiment on Gesture’s Role in Speech Processing

Kita’s experiment found that when participants were required to describe difficult images, they produced more representational gestures, but not more beat gestures. This suggests that gesture is linked to cognitive effort—"participants produced more representational gestures in the hard condition than in the easy condition, while using comparable content in speech" (Church et al., 2017, p. 410).

The Effect of Restricting Gesture

When children were prevented from gesturing while explaining concepts, their speech lacked complex comparative phrases, descriptions of transformation, and hypothetical reasoning (Church et al., 2017, p. 422). Conversely, when gesture was allowed, children were able to focus on spatio-motoric information and integrate deictic gestures into their explanations (Church et al., 2017, p. 424).

Gesture as a Cognitive Tool

Speakers who were allowed to gesture expressed a greater percentage of key events with semantically rich verbs than those who could not (Church et al., 2017, p. 424). Furthermore, those who could not gesture were more likely to begin their sentences with fillers like "um," "uh," "and," or "then" (Church et al., 2017, p. 425).

Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) Framework

The GSA framework claims that gestures emerge from perceptual representations and links with action in the minds of speakers. Researchers argue that "psychological processes are grounded in the sensorimotor system and that action is an integral part of perception" (Glenberg, Witt, & Metcalfe, 2013) (Church et al., 2017, p. 456).

Conclusion

Gestures serve as a unique cognitive and communicative tool—"they highlight perceptual-motor representations in two ways: they signal that a specific type of representation is activated in the speaker’s mind, and they strengthen that representation, influencing memory and attention" (Church et al., 2017, p. 468).

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Reference: Church, R. Breckinridge, Martha W. Alibali, and Spencer D. Kelly, eds., Why Gesture?: How the Hands Function in Speaking, Thinking and Communicating, Gesture Studies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), vii https://doi.org/10.1075/gs.7