SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The field of gesture classification has b Abstract een an area of intense scholarship in recent decades. This article provides a brief overview of the area in seeking to understand how this theoretical framework relates to the way speakers attend to gestural information. 48 native English speakers participated in a web-based survey centred on a short narrative. The gestures focused on in the film narrative were based around McNeill’s common gesture typology. Half of the participants watched the video with sound and the other half without to help ascertain whether the presence of speech affects how people attend to gestural information. Participants were asked to count the total number of gestures and list what they thought the five “best” examples of a gesture were. While there was no significant difference between the number of gestures counted by each group, the categories of gesture which were attended to varied between the two groups. Those with sound were more likely to include iconic gestures while those without were more likely to attend to beat gestures. This indicates that the presence or absence of sound has no affect on how many gestures participants observe, but it does affect what gestural information they pay more attention to.