Hand gestures in speech: studies on their roles in social interaction

When people talk, they often move their hands and their arms. These movements seem to have some type of relationship with concurrent speech. Some of the results of a research project on gestures are presented here. These studies aimed at describing different gestures occurring during speech, and at understanding their roles in different contexts of social interaction. Research topics therefore are: categorization of gesture communication, reliability of tools for coding hand gestures, and functions of gesture in speech and in interaction. In particular, these studies had two aims in mind: a) the development of a reliable coding system and a relative multi-medial support for the categorization of hand gesture (descriptive-structural aim); b) individuation of gesture functions in conversation through statistical analysis of significant speech-gesture co-occurrences (descriptive-functional aim). The main theoretical premises relating to each aim are here synthetically explained. Key-words: gesture structure, gesture function, gesture-speech coordination.

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