Raising the Ante of Communication: Evidence for Enhanced Gesture Use in High Stakes Situations

Spencer Kelly,Kelly Byrne,Judith Holler

doi:10.3390/info2040579

Abstract

Theorists of language have argued that co-speech hand gestures are an intentional part of social communication. The present study provides evidence for these claims by showing that speakers adjust their gesture use according to their perceived relevance to the audience. Participants were asked to read about items that were and were not useful in a wilderness survival scenario, under the pretense that they would then explain (on camera) what they learned to one of two different audiences. For one audience (a group of college students in a dormitory orientation activity), the stakes of successful communication were low; for the other audience (a group of students preparing for a rugged camping trip in the mountains), the stakes were high. In their explanations to the camera, participants in the high stakes condition produced three times as many representational gestures, and spent three times as much time gesturing, than participants in the low stakes condition. This study extends previous research by showing that the anticipated consequences of one’s communication—namely, the degree to which information may be useful to an intended recipient—influences speakers’ use of gesture.

Highlights

McNeill [1,2] postulates that language consists of a combination of both speech and co-speech gestures, that neither on its own is sufficient to constitute our most basic form of communication, and that these two modalities form a tightly integrated system
The present study focuses on the second component of the gesture as simulated action (GSA)—the gesture threshold—and tests one of the explicit predictions made by Hostetter and Alibali [25] about it, namely that, “A speaker who is in a situation where the stakes of communicating are high should gesture more than a speaker who is in a situation where the stakes are not as high” (p. 511)
The average percentage of time spent gesturing was more than three times lower for the low stakes (M = 6.85%, SD = 9.22) compared to high stakes condition (M = 21.87%, SD = 20.18), t(18) = 2.11, p = 0.025 (Figure 1). This effect held even when removing participants who produced no gestures at all, with the remaining participants spending significantly less time gesturing in the low stakes (M = 8.56%, SD = 9.62) compared to the high stakes condition (M = 24.08%, SD = 19.83), t(15) = 2.01, p = 0.032

Summary

Introduction

McNeill [1,2] postulates that language consists of a combination of both speech and co-speech gestures, that neither on its own is sufficient to constitute our most basic form of communication, and that these two modalities form a tightly integrated system. Researchers have postulated that co-speech gestures are not just informative from the addressee’s perspective, but that they are produced by speakers with communicative intent [9,10,11], that is, with the intent to convey a meaningful message successfully to an addressee According to this view, speakers employ the gestural modality in conjunction with speech in order to best meet the demands of a current communicative situation, determined largely by the addressee’s informational needs. Co-speech gestures are seen as an integral element of language use in communicative interactions elicited and shaped by social context and the reciprocal nature of dialogue [11,12,13]

Methods

Results

Conclusion