Gesture System Research Articles

Effects of Induced Motor Gestures on Vocal Output

The communicative act is a complex phenomenon involving gestural and expressive, as well as vocal, components. In the present experiment, the relationship between gestural and vocal components was studied by imposing an arbitrary gesture on a speaker and examining its effect on his verbal output. Subjects either performed or viewed a circular or linear gesture, and were required to simultaneously produce either short stories or words in restricted categories. Analysis of the story protocols showed a significant effect of gesture type in both the observed and produced conditions. No such effect was found for word production. These results suggest that meaning was conveyed by the gestures, and that the gestural and vocal systems are not independent during the communicative act. Furthermore, the gesture is capable of constraining the content of vocal output at the ideational level of production (stories), but not at the level of production of individual words.