Language
Why do some people gesture more than others when they talk?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People with weaker visual memory, mental rotation and conceptual-planning skills used more meaning-carrying hand gestures, whereas more empathic people used more listener-directed gestures and bigger, higher gestures overall.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session individual-differences study: gestures elicited in phrase-definition and social-dilemma tasks were coded and correlated with / regressed on empathy and six cognitive ability scores measured with gesturing prevented
- N
- N=122 · 129 native British English speakers were recruited; 7 were excluded (1 did not understand the tasks, 6 did not finish), leaving 122 analysed
- Population
- Native British English speakers (mean age 19.41 years) from academic senior schools, vocational schools and universities in the West Midlands, UK
- Outcome
- Frequency (per 100 words) of representational, conduit and palm-revealing gestures, and gesture saliency (size and height)
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Key findings
Participants produced 8,646 gestures, 67% of them representational. Lower visual working memory, slower mental rotation and more errors on the conceptualization task each predicted more frequent representational gestures, and the regression models explained about 22-23% of the variance. Conduit gestures were predicted by poorer visual working memory and conceptualization but also by higher empathy, and empathy predicted more palm-revealing gestures and more salient gestures of all types. Verbal working memory and word-retrieval speed did not predict how often or how saliently anyone gestured.
Methodology
The researchers tested 122 young people from schools, vocational colleges and universities so that cognitive abilities would vary widely. Participants defined abstract phrases (such as 'to intervene') and talked through social dilemmas while being filmed, and every gesture was coded as representational (depicting or pointing), conduit (offering an idea on an open palm) or palm-revealing (showing uncertainty), and rated for size and height. Separately, with their hands kept still, participants completed tests of verbal, visual and spatial working memory, mental rotation, conceptual planning and word retrieval, plus an empathy questionnaire. Correlations and multiple regressions linked each predictor to gesture frequency and saliency.
Limitations
The design is correlational, so it cannot show that gesturing helps people with weaker spatial skills; the authors stress that only experiments that encourage or prohibit gesturing can test gesture functions. Each ability was measured with a single task, so scores may reflect other abilities too (the 'task impurity' problem), and empathy was a self-report questionnaire rather than a direct measure of caring about clear communication. The elicitation tasks placed little load on verbal memory or word finding, so the null results for those abilities may reflect the tasks rather than a true absence of a link. The sample was young people from urban Britain, and most of the variance in gesturing remained unexplained.
How this study connects
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