(Amphithéâtre)
Beattie, Geoffrey
Shovelton, Heather
University of Manchester, Manchester
Interlocutors do get the message : how imagistic
gestures add crucial meaning in narrative
This talk will review research at Manchester, which has repeatedly
demonstrated that participants who hear samples of speech and see
the accompanying imagistic gestures do obtain signifi cant amounts
of semantic information, particularly about the semantic features
‘size’ and ‘relative position’, compared to those who just hear the
speech. But this research has been characterized by an emphasis on
carefully controlled stimuli, restricted samples of speech and imagistic
gesture and explicit experimental procedures. It left many questions
unanswered. For example, it did not attempt to analyze the
signifi cance of the additional information received from the gesture
for the narrative as a whole. Our new research addresses this and
other questions. Focusing on the semantic feature ‘size’ we isolated
every single instance of size information in our corpus and identifi ed
whether this size information was encoded in speech, in gesture,
or in speech and gesture. Crucially, it considered the judged relative
importance of each instance of size information. It found that
high importance size information was signifi cantly more likely to be
encoded in gesture rather than in speech, and suggests that speakers
may vary what information is encoded gesturally, according to its
salience for the overall meaning to be conveyed. In a second study
we investigated whether the information in the imagistic gestures
was represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative. It found
that two thirds of the semantic information, previously thought to
be carried by gesture, was, in fact, represented either implicitly or
explicitly elsewhere in the linguistic discourse. However, one third
of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures was
not represented linguistically, even when the whole narrative was
considered. These new results, going beyond the original experimental
paradigm, do demonstrate conclusively the communicative power
of those imagistic gestures that accompany talk.