This paper presents two projects underway at the School of Languages and Linguistics of the University of New South Wales which examine the use of co-speech gestures.
The first project investigates how intermediate and advanced learners of French, German and Greek use gesture when they are giving a prepared oral presentation, in particular how they use some gestures to present ideas to the audience (presentational gestures) and some others to depict or represent ideas (representational gestures). A common data collection protocol was devised for the three groups, including task instructions for the students, video-taping procedures and a transcription method. The main findings so far indicate that, while typical hand shapes associated with the presentation function exist in the corpus, speakers seem to use them (or not) according to their individual gestural repertoires. As for representational gestures, these tend to happen in clusters during sequences of topic development and can be, some times, very elaborate configurations. The talk will discuss these findings and present excerpts of the corpus.
The second project is PhD research investigating how speakers of English and French use gesture to communicate the fixed location of objects in space. Data was collected in Australia and in France from native speakers of each language. Subsequent transcription and analysis of both speech and gesture reveal how speakers divide the task of communicating locative semantic information between the two modalities. One recurrent example of this, which will be presented in the talk, is how Australian English speakers use the preposition ‘next to’. While this preposition encodes adjacency, it leaves lateral (left/right) direction unspecified. The data reveal that speakers frequently deploy co-speech gestures to express this information, thereby revealing the coalition of speech and gesture in the communication of lateral adjacency and lateral direction.
Authors: Alexis Tabensky & Mark Tutton
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop