Do gestures have meaning? An empirical analysis on the gestures performed by Fidel Castro at the United Nations

Abstract

In everyday conversations, there are said to be unconscious meanings that we convey through our body. For example, if a story is being told, our hands move according to the message, following a rhythm and forming shapes that we are unaware of. According to McNeill (1992), gestures are a form of language different from speech, but even though they have been regarded as individual entities, they are, in fact, parallel and work in synch with each other. This is the scope of the analysis of gestures. In the following paper, the objective was to test whether there is an association between gestures and meaning. Consequently, the gestures of former Cuban president, Fidel Castro, were extracted and analyzed from his intervention at the United Nations in 1979. The process of annotation was carried out on the program ELAN, based on a series of categories: the type of gesture and topic, the position and movement of both arms and hands as well as the orientation. Additionally, a series of quantitative and qualitative analysis were performed through the statistical program R. A Chi-squared test showed a significant relationship between the type of gestures and the topics which was further corroborated through a conditional inference tree and a multiple correspondence analysis, reaffirming the idea that these are form-meaning pairs. Moreover, there was a strong connection between the type of gesture and arm movement, suggesting that this is due to the intention of the message while the orientation of the hand was a clear indicator of arm movement.