Cover not available

Article published In: Gesture
Vol. 15:3 (2016) ► pp.357–371

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Do people gesture more when instructed to?

 | Case Western Reserve University
 | Case Western Reserve University
 | Case Western Reserve University
 | Case Western Reserve University
 | Case Western Reserve University
Published online: 6 December 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.15.3.05par
Does being instructed to gesture encourage those with low gesture rates to produce more gestures? If participants do gesture more when asked to, do they produce the same kinds of gestures? Does this vary as a function of the type of discourse being produced? We asked participants to take part in three tasks, a quasi-conversational task, a spatial problem solving task, and a narrative task, in two phases. In the first they received no instruction, and in the second they were asked to gesture. The instruction to gesture did not change gesture rate or gesture type across phases. We suggest that while explicitly asking participants to gesture may not always achieve higher gesture rates, it also does not negatively impact natural behavior.
References (32)
Alibali, Martha W. (2005). Gesture in spatial cognition: Expressing, communicating, and thinking about spatial information. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 5 (4), 307–331. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beilock, Sian & Susan Goldin-Meadow (2010). Gesture changes thought by grounding it in action. Psychological Science, 21 (11), 1605–1610. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Broaders, Sara C., Susan W. Cook, Zachary Mitchell, & Susan Goldin-Meadow (2007). Making children gesture brings out implicit knowledge and leads to learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136 (4), 539–550. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Campbell, Anne & J. Phillipe Rushton (1978). Bodily communication and personality. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 171, 31–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chu, Mingyuan & Sotaro Kita (2011). The nature of gestures’ beneficial role in spatial problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140 (1), 102–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cook, Susan W., Terina K. Yip, & Susan Goldin-Meadow (2010). Gesturing makes memories that last. Journal of Memory & Language, 631, 465–475. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Costa, Paul T. Jr., Antonio Terracciano, & Robert R. McCrae (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (2), 322–331. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crasborn, Onno & Han Sloetjes (2008). Enhanced ELAN functionality for sign language corpora. In Onno Crasborn, Thomas Hanke, Eleni Efthimiou, Inge Zwitserlood, & Ernst Thoutenhoofd (Eds.), Construction and exploitation of sign language corpora: 3rd workshop on the representation and processing of sign languages (pp. 39–43). Paris: ELDA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Freleng, Isadore D. (Director) (1946). Baseball bugs [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Susan C. Levine, Elena Zinchenko, Terina K.Y. Yip, Naureen Hemani, & Laiah Factor (2012). Doing gesture promotes learning a mental transformation task better than seeing gesture. Developmental Science, 15 (6), 876–884. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Judith (2001). Status, gender, and nonverbal behavior in candid and posed photographs: A study of conversations between university employees. Sex Roles, 44 (11/12), 677–692. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2006). Nonverbal behavior, status, and gender: How do we understand their relations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 301, 384–391. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Judith & Gregory B. Friedman (1999). Status, gender, and nonverbal behavior: A study of structured interactions between employees of a company. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (9), 1082–1091. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Judith & Frank J. Bernieri (2001). Interpersonal sensitivity: Theory and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Helweg-Larsen, Marie, Stephanie J. Cunningham, Amanda Carrico, & Alison Pergram (2004). To nod or not to nod: An observational study of nonverbal communication and status in female and male college students. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 281, 358–361. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Henley, Nancy M. (1977). Body politics: Power, sex and nonverbal communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hostetter, Autumn B., Kirsten Bieda, Martha W. Alibali, Mitchell Nathan, & Eric J. Knuth (2006). Don’t just tell them, show them! Teachers can intentionally alter their instructional gestures. In Ron Sun (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1523–1528). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jones, Chuck (Director) (1949). Fast and furrious [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(Director) (1949). For scent-imental reasons [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(Director) (1949). Feed the kitty [Television series episode]. Warner Brothers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macedonia, Manuela & Katharina von Kriegstein. (2012). Gestures enhance foreign language learning. Biolinguistics, 6(3/4), 393–416.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McNeill, David (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parrill, Fey (2010). Viewpoint in speech-gesture integration: Linguistic structure, discourse structure, and event structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25 (5), 650–668. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pika, Simone, Elena Nicoladis, & Paula Marentette (2006). A cross-cultural study on the use of gestures: Evidence for cross-linguistic transfer? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (3), 319–327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
So, Wing Chee (2010). Cross-cultural transfer in gesture frequency in Chinese-English bilinguals. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25 (10), 1335–1353. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stevanoni, Elizabeth & Karen Salmon (2005). Giving memory a hand: Instructing children to gesture enhances their recall. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 29 (4), 217–233. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Anders, Sari M. (2013). Beyond masculinity: Testosterone, gender/sex, and human social behavior in a comparative context. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 341, 198–210. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vandenberg, Steven G. & Allan R. Kuse (1978). Mental rotation, a group test of 3-D spatial visualization. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 471, 599–604. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wartenburger, Isabell, Esther Kühn, Uta Sassenberg, Manja Foth, Elizabeth A. Franz, & Elke van der Meer (2010). On the relationship between fluid intelligence, gesture production, and brain structure. Intelligence, 381, 193–201. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Willems, Roel, Aslı Özyürek, & Peter Hagoort (2006). When language meets action: The neural integration of gesture and speech. Cerebral Cortex, 17 (10), 2322–2333. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Wang, Juan, Yuan Gao & Yaqiong Cui
2023. Classroom gesture instruction on second language learners' academic presentations: Evidence from Chinese intermediate English learners. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 66 ► pp. 101304 ff. DOI logo
Cravotta, Alice, M. Grazia Busà & Pilar Prieto
2019. Effects of Encouraging the Use of Gestures on Speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62:9 ► pp. 3204 ff. DOI logo
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Martha W. Alibali
2019. Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26:3 ► pp. 721 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue