Gesture Form Convergence in Joint Description

Pairs of speakers participated in a joint-description task involving 10 cartoon clips. In a within-participants design that varied whether speakers could see each other, dyads described the content of the cartoons together to a video camera. From this, iconic gestures (i.e., gestures representing objects and events through the shape and movement of hands) referring to the same objects and events by both members of dyads were extracted to examine their similarity in handshape. Greater similarity of handshapes across speakers was found when speakers could see each other. The finding indicates that one speaker’s gestures influence another speaker’s gestures.

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