Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production

According to the article conversational gestures are unplanned. The prevailing view is that
gestures are used to enhance communication by conveying informations that amplifies and
modulates the information that is being spoken by the speaker (Birdwhistell, 1970; Graham
and Argyle, 1975; Kendon, 1983, 1987). However, recent research gave doubt on the
communicative importance of conversational gestures (Feyereisen, Van de Wiele and
Dubois, 1988; Krauss, Dushay, Chen and Rausher, 1995; Krauss, morrel-Samuels, and
Colasante, 1991) leading some researchers to speculate about the possible about
noncommunitive functions gestures ay serve (Feyereisen and deLannoy, 1991; Hadar, 1989;
Krauss et al., 1991; Morrel-Samuels and Krauss, 1992; Rime and Schiaratura, 1991).

There are three studies that are conducted in order to examine the effects of preventing
gestures in speeches. Lickiss and Wellens (1978) found out that restraining speakers from
using hand movements during speeches had no effects on their verbal fluency. However, it
is unclear exactly which dysfluences were examined. Graham and Heywood (1975)
conducted a research examining the six subjects describing abstract line drawings on trials
using varied set of linguistic indices. They concluded that “elimination of gesture has no
particularly marked effects on speech performance”. Rime, Schiaratura, Hupet, and
Ghysselinckx (1984) compared the contents of subjects’ speech while their heads, arms,
hands, legs, and feet were restrained with the content of their speech under normal
circumstances.

There are two different types of what we call conversational gestures that can be
considered. The first type is the “motor movements” (Hadar, 1989) which is also known as
“batonic gestures” {Bull, 1987) and “beats” (McNeill, 1987, 1992). Researchers had
recognized that this type of conversational gestures are simple, brief, repetitive,
coordinated with speech prosody. The second category consists of movements that are
more complex, less repetitive, more varied, and of longer duration than motor movements
and seem related in form to the ideational content of accompanying speech. This is called
the “lexical movements” (Hadar, 1989) or “illustrators” (Ekman and Friesen, 1972) or
“representational gestures” (McNeill, 1992).

Different hand signs are used in each conversational gestures. They are often reffered as
emblems. Emblems can be used to clearly convey semantic information and in absence of
speech.

Speakers are more likely to make hand gestures when the contents of their speech is spatial.
They have difficulties in producing speech with spatial content when they cannot gesture.

Making gesture helps a speaker conceptualize the spatial relations that will be expressed in
his or her speech.