Letting Our Hands Do the Talking: Communication Through Gesture

The current study examined the impact of interactive communication upon representational forms of gesture, specifically investigating whether this process followed a collaborative rather than autonomous pattern. Past research has confirmed that communication through speech and graphics is consistent with a collaborative view of conversation, but this as yet had not been examined for gesture. In the first experiment, participants completed a referential communication task, attempting to communicate a number of specific concepts to a partner. Consistent with research into other modalities, it was apparent that gestures became significantly refined as a result of interaction. Performance of a second experiment investigated whether through repeated interaction, gestures became increasingly symbolic, being more difficult to identify as the amount of background information available to naïve overseers was reduced. It appears that gestures were shifting from initial representations high in iconicity to symbolic forms that were more abstract as interaction progressed. This expands upon the current theory of collaborative communication, confirming communication appears to be a collaborative process, irrespective of modality. Practically, this study may help to clarify the often cloudy understanding of how fully regulated signed languages arise. It would appear spontaneous gestures may develop into local conventions through recurrent use amongst small interacting communities. If these local conventions continue to be used, they are likely to increasingly used by greater numbers of individuals. As this increasingly larger population of individuals using these conventions expands, they are likely to undergo further refinement, resulting in the highly symbolic, conventional signs seen in visual-gestural languages such as AusLan and ASL.