Renia Lopez-Ozieblo
Comparing Gesture
This project sought to compare the speech-gesture link in speakers of English as a foreign language (FL), speakers of different mother tongues (L1). It was a small pilot study with just two speakers from every L1 and an additional two speakers of English (UK) that would serve as reference. Our participants were speakers of Polish, Romanian, Italian, Farsi, Cantonese and Mandarin. Various analysis were carried out on their data. The sections below link to the various studies and conclusions extracted.
Temporal markers
In this study we analysed the temporal markers (TM) produced by the non-native participants and analysed the gestures co-occurring with them. About 26% of all TM (out of 101) were not accompanied by a gesture. The other 75 markers mostly co-occurred with related gestures 68% (or 51% of all TMs), and the rest occurred with unrelated gestures (32% of 75 TM with gestures or 24% of the total TMs). Many of the unrelated gestures were anaphoric, relating to previous events or discursive, used to manage the flow of the narration.
Our related TM-related gesture percentage is the same as that observed by Pagán Cánovas et all., (2020). They did a metastudy of TM and gestures finding that the more frequent the TM the fewer gestures. We would like to add that this relationship is not so simple, as gestures will also depend on the speaker (here, FL speakers who might have used gestures to help establish connections in the narration), the content (here, a narration with a series of similar episodes that were differentiated through the gesture) and the context (in this case a lab and a task that required a narration).
The summarized data is available here (including information on the participants).
References
Lopez-Ozieblo (submitted). Information theory might not be enough to explain gesture –speech unit frequencies. More examples from temporal markers.
Pragmatic gestures
After observing our many participants gesture and analyzing how and when they were gesturing, we observed one particular gesture that kept re-occurring, a palm up open hand (or hands, sometimes both hands mirrored each other). This gesture has already been identified as a recurrent gesture, those that can be observed in different speakers and different contexts (Ladewig, 2014). We were interested in finding out why it was used so often. Through its analysis we concluded that it has a number of pragmatic functions which could be categorized using an existing linguistic framework developed for discourse markers. The pragmatic functions are metadiscursive, managing the flow of the narration; interactive, taking into account the interlocutor; and cognitive, logico-argumentative gestures that help establish inferences, the speakers' stance, causality and other logical connections between utterances. A copy of the paper is available in Research Gate.
References
Lopez-Ozieblo, R. (2020). Proposing a revised functional classification of pragmatic gestures. Lingua. Doi 10.13140/RG.2.2.32493.61927