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Abstract

In everyday life, speech is accompanied by gestures. In the present study, two experiments tested the possibility that spontaneous gestures accompanying speech carry prosodic information. Experiment 1 showed that gestures provide prosodic information, as adults are able to perceive the congruency between low-pass filtered—thus unintelligible—speech and the gestures of the speaker. Experiment 2 shows that in the case of ambiguous sentences (i.e., sentences with two alternative meanings depending on their prosody) mismatched prosody and gestures lead participants to choose more often the meaning signaled by gestures. Our results demonstrate that the prosody that characterizes speech is not a modality specific phenomenon: it is also perceived in the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech. We draw the conclusion that spontaneous gestures and speech form a single communication system where the suprasegmental aspects of spoken language are mapped to the motor-programs responsible for the production of both speech sounds and hand gestures.

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Gesture and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture

Martha W. Alibali, Sotaro Kita, Amanda J Young (2000)

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Gesturing saves cognitive resources when talking about nonpresent objects.

Raedy M Ping, Susan Goldin-Meadow (2010)

In numerous experimental contexts, gesturing has been shown to lighten a speaker's cognitive load. However, in all of these experimental paradigms, the gestures have been directed to items in the "here-and-now." This study attempts to generalize gesture's ability to lighten cognitive load. We demonstrate here that gesturing continues to confer cognitive benefits when speakers talk about objects that are not present, and therefore cannot be directly indexed by gesture. These findings suggest that gesturing confers its benefits by more than simply tying abstract speech to the objects directly visible in the environment. Moreover, we show that the cognitive benefit conferred by gesturing is greater when novice learners produce gestures that add to the information expressed in speech than when they produce gestures that convey the same information as speech, suggesting that it is gesture's meaningfulness that gives it the ability to affect working memory load. Copyright © 2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.