Abstract :
[en] Research on co-verbal gestures has revealed that gestures are cognitively and communicatively quite advantageous to both speakers and hearers. Despite these communicative benefits, there is considerable variation in speakers’ gestural behaviour, which can be attributed to a variety of social factors, such as age, gender, culture, etc. and cognitive factors (see, a.o., Gullberg, de Bot, & Volterra 2008; Hostetter & Alibali 2007; Hostetter & Potthoff 2012). There is also intra-speaker variation in that speakers gesture more on some occasions than others. For instance, people gesture more when they see their interlocutor. Also, in the case of misunderstandings, speakers have been shown to gesture more and in a more articulated fashion (Holler & Wilkin 2009). Alamillo, Coletta & Guidetti (2010) also show text type related variation: in their study, gestures were more frequent in explanations than in narratives.
This paper contributes to the study of such gestural variation, but in a more constant context. The data analysed is drawn from video-taped picture descriptions where subjects (native speakers and learners of English, Dutch, and French) were asked to talk about the location of certain entities on these pictures (see Lemmens & Perrez 2012, 2017). The setting and task were in all cases identical. The focus of the present talk will be on the gestures used by speakers when locating entities, and in particular, variation in the use of gesture, both cross-linguistically as in relation to the topic that speakers talk about.
One of the striking cross-linguistic differences is, for example, that the Dutch speakers use more representational gestures which express location, direction, shape and size, whereas the French speakers gesture much less frequently (if at all), and their gestures are less precise and of more meta- communicative nature. Further differences can be observed between native speakers and learners. On the whole, the learners use more reality-anchored gestures, but also more meta-communicative gestures pertaining to their linguistic shortcomings, such as open hands or shrugs, search for words gestures (see Ladewig 2011; Debras 2015). In addition, aligned with verbal hesitations and retakes, there is more “gestural stuttering”.
Another striking variation is that in the pictures to be described (the same set for all subjects), there are scenes which lead to what, using Corts’ (2006) term, can be called “gestures burst”, where not only more speakers gesture but they also tend to gesture more intensively (multiple gestures applied to the same reality). Our data reveal gestural “heat-maps” which indicate the variable degree of gestural density for specific spatial configurations. As it turns out, these are typically more complex spatial configurations, where the gestures facilitate and/or augment the descriptive task at hand. In the learner data, such gesture bursts often occur to compensate their lack of lexical resources or accuracy (see also Gullberg 2009; Gullberg & Marziano 2013).
The study not only confirms that gesture and language form a co-constructed unit of communication (cf. Kendon 2004, McNeill 1992), but that there is gestural variation just as much as there is verbal variation and that some variation is recurrent across languages and proficiency.
