Sotaro KitaWhen people speak, they spontaneously gesture. A growing body of literature indicate that such gestures serve various communicative functions. However, there is controversy concerning possible speaker-internal functions of such gestures. Does production of gesture have any influence on the speaker him/herself? Does it help speech production processes? If so, how? These are the questions that I will address in my presentation. I will focus on so-called representational gestures, in which hand movement indicates or depicts the referent. I will argue that the production of this type of gestures is a form of thinking. Thus, the locus of gestural influence on speech production is at the conceptual planning level (as opposed to the speech formulation level). Furthermore, since gesturing is a form of thinking, it influences not only speaking but also reasoning about spatial information.
Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
The empirical support for these claims come from experiments involving Piagetian conservation tasks, in which children are asked to make judgment about quantity (e.g., quantity of liquid in containers with different shapes), and to explain their own answers. We analyzed gesture and speech in their explanation.