The effect of gesture on speech production and comprehension. | Goliath Business News - 7 views
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one primary objective of this study was to examine the relationships among gesture, speech production, and listener comprehension. In doing so, we address two questions: First, do gestures enhance listener comprehension? Second, if gesture enhances comprehension, how does it do so? Does gesture have a direct effect on listener comprehension, or does gesture enhance listener comprehension only because it aids the speaker in producing more effective speech? Thus our first objective in this study was to examine the extent to which gesture enhances listener comprehension and the extent to which this relationship is mediated by the effect of gesture on speech production.
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they gesture more on certain types of words or phrases. For example, Rauscher et al. (1996) found that gesturing was nearly five times more frequent on "spatial content phrases" (phrases containing spatial prepositions such as "under" and "on") than on nonspatial phrases. Moreover, they found that not being able to gesture was more damaging when the speaker attempted to convey spatial content. Therefore, a second objective of this study was to examine whether gesture (or not being able to gesture) is more important for some types of speech than for others.