What triggers a gesture? Exploring affordance compatibility effects in representational gesture production

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Human Communication

Background:

• Cospeech gestures are closely linked to object-related actions.
• Previous research suggests gestures originate from perceptual and motoric simulations during speech processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the mechanisms behind spontaneous cospeech gesture production.
• To test if object affordances directly influence gesture generation, inspired by stimulus-response compatibility paradigms.

Main Methods:

• A replication of Tucker and Ellis' (1998) stimulus-response compatibility experiment was conducted.
• Cospeech gestures were compared when objects were oriented towards the dominant vs. nondominant hand, and in upright vs. inverted orientations.

Main Results:

• The replication of Tucker and Ellis' (1998) findings was unsuccessful.
• Enhancing grasping potential did not increase cospeech gesture production.
• Upright objects elicited more gestures than inverted ones, suggesting a partial relation between affordance and gesture.

Conclusions:

• The automaticity of affordance effects on gesture production is challenged.
• Findings suggest cospeech gestures may stem more from communicating action-evoking content than object affordance compatibility.