Gesture · 2007 · 166 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesCommunicationLinguisticsCognitive PsychologyIndividual DifferencesPsycholinguisticsSemantic ProcessingSpatial AwarenessSpatial CognitionSpeech ProductionVerbal BehaviorVerbal CommunicationCognitive SkillsGesture-speech RelationshipIndividual Learner DifferencesLearner Individual Differences
People vary widely in how often they gesture while speaking. The study examined how verbal and spatial abilities predict gesture rates, hypothesizing that low verbal but high spatial skill would lead to more gestures. The authors measured semantic and phonemic fluency and spatial visualization with a visualization task to assess their relation to gesture rates. Results showed that low phonemic fluency combined with high spatial skill predicted higher gesture rates, while semantic fluency had no effect; both low and high phonemic fluency groups produced more representational gestures than the average, indicating gesture production is linked to cognitive skill differences.
Individuals differ greatly in how often they gesture when they speak. This study investigated relations between speakers’ verbal and spatial skills and their gesture rates. Two types of verbal skill were measured: semantic fluency, which is thought to index efficiency with lexical access, and phonemic fluency, which is thought to index efficiency with organizing the lexicon in novel ways. Spatial skill was measured with a visualization task. We hypothesized that individuals with low verbal skill but high spatial visualization skill would gesture most often, due to having mental images not closely linked to verbal forms. This hypothesis was supported for phonemic fluency, but not for semantic fluency. We also found that individuals with low phonemic fluency and individuals with high phonemic fluency produced representational gestures at higher rates than individuals with average phonemic fluency. The findings indicate that individual differences in gesture production are associated with individual differences in cognitive skills.