Abstract Gestures are a fundamental component of primate communication. Here, we used social network analyses to assess how similarities in socio-demographic and contextual profiles (proximity, kinship, age similarity, sex combination, contextual similarity) related to patterns of gestural communication (repertoire similarity, gestural frequency and responsiveness), at the individual, dyadic and group levels. We recorded gestures in two captive groups of Sumatran orangutans ( Pongo abelii ) ( N = 16). Principal component analyses revealed two main dimensions explaining variance in gestural profiles, reflecting spatial proximity, contextual similarity and partially kinship and sex combination. At the dyadic level, spatial proximity predicted higher gestural frequency, whereas communities were mainly described by kinship, age and contextual similarity. These findings suggest that while spatial proximity and contextual similarity consistently shaped gestural communication at the individual level, demographic variables became more influential at the community level, where gestural communities may rather reflect enduring demographic and contextual characteristics.
Abstract Acquiring second language (L2) prosody, specifically stress, is challenging for learners. While beat gestures reinforce prosodic cues in a native language (L1), their role in L2 stress perception and its interaction with cognitive individual differences is underexplored. This study investigates if beat gestures facilitate L2 stress perception and how this relates to learners’ visuospatial, phonological, and executive working memory (WM). Twenty-four native Dutch speakers completed an L2 Stress Perception Task. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that participants with better phonological WM showed higher stress identification accuracy, corroborating its importance in L2 acquisition. However, no benefit of beat gestures was found for either stress identification accuracy or reaction times. Executive and visuospatial WM showed no main effects, nor did any of the WM components interact with the gesture condition. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating cognitive individual difference measures, as they may have a greater impact than the gesture effect itself.
Abstract Over the past few decades, gesture researchers have shown growing interest in the idea that certain gestural forms are conventionally associated with fairly specific, yet not too narrow, semantic and pragmatic meanings. These gestures are referred to as recurrent gestures and are argued to be grounded in bodily experiences, including instrumental actions and movement patterns. In this paper, we first provide supporting evidence for the conventionalized status of the target kinetic pattern of this study — the Two-Handed Alternation gesture on the Sagittal axis (2HAS). We then demonstrate how two different types of embodied motivations, namely mimetic schemas (grounded in instrumental actions) and image schemas (grounded in bodily experiences of movement patterns), converge in the single recurrent kinetic pattern of 2HAS, giving rise to its various referential and pragmatic functions.
Some studies have shown cross-cultural differences in the frequency of representational gesture production. There have been anecdotal reports of Arabic speakers gesturing frequently in order to depict their message. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether Arabic speakers use more representational gestures than English speakers when telling a story. Secondarily, we tested whether that difference was mediated by story quality. We asked adults who spoke either Egyptian Arabic as a first language and English monolinguals to watch a cartoon and tell the story back. The Arabic speakers gestured significantly more than the English speakers. While story quality approached significance as an independent predictor of gesture production, we found no evidence that it mediated the cross-cultural difference. One interpretation of these results is that there are cultural norms for gesture frequency.
This study assessed if early multimodality increasingly involves more mature productions, in a pragmatic (i.e., declaratives) and referential (i.e., words) sense, and if it is associated with grammar, which would point to multimodality's role in language development. Data is derived from the spontaneous multimodal behaviours of 8-to-28-month-old Peruvian children, along with data collected with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). We found the production of multimodal behaviours that included words correlated positively (i) with age, an effect especially strong for declaratives, and (ii) with the spontaneous production of multiword utterances. Also, (iii) the production of multimodal behaviours correlated positively with the morphosyntactic complexity score (CDI), and (iv) multimodal behaviours involving vocalizations specifically correlated negatively with MLU (CDI). Therefore, early multimodality presents a language-oriented profile, increasingly favouring combinations with words and a declarative function, and correlating with multiword utterances, as well as with a more mature morphosyntactic profile.
