Nonverbal Behavior and Nonverbal Communication: What do Conversational Hand Gestures Tell Us?

Abstract

This chapter explores how gestures contribute to comprehension, how gesturing affect speech and what can be learned from studying conversational gestures. The primary function of conversational hand gestures is to aid in the formulation of speech. Gestures can convey nonsemantic information. The study of speech and gestures overlaps with the study of person perception and attribution processes. The significance of gestures can be ambiguous and will affect the meanings and consequences to the observed gestures. A topology of gestures is adopters, symbolic gestures, and conversational gestures. Different types of conversational gestures can be distinguished as—namely, motor movements and lexical movements. Conversational hand gestures have been assumed to convey semantic information. Several studies that attempt to assess the kinds of information conversational gestures convey to naive observers and the extent to which gestures enhance the communicativeness of spoken messages are described in the chapter.