Adaptation in gesture: Converging hands or converging minds?

Abstract

Interlocutors sometimes repeat each other’s co-speech hand gestures. In three experiments, we investigate to what extent the copying of such gestures’ form is tied to their meaning in the linguistic context, as well as to interlocutors’ representations of this meaning at the conceptual level. We found that gestures were repeated only if they could be interpreted within the meaningful context provided by speech. We also found evidence that the copying of gesture forms is mediated by representations of meaning. That is, representations of meaning are also converging across interlocutors rather than just representations of gesture form. We conclude that the repetition across interlocutors of representational hand gestures may be driven by representations at the conceptual level, as has also been proposed for the repetition of referring expressions across interlocutors (lexical entrainment). That is, adaptation in gesture resembles adaptation in speech, rather than it being an instance of automated motor-mimicry.