| CRC Colloquium |
| Monday, 11/03/08 16:00 - 18:00 | |
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Dr Judith Holler Lecturer in Language & Communication Coupland Building 1 School of Psychological Sciences University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL Judith.Holler@manchester.ac.uk Web: Judith Holler Co-speech gestures for grounding There has been much discussion about the role speech-accompanying hand gestures play in communication, with some theories emphasising the facilitation of the speaker’s own cognitive processes, and others the communication process with the addressee. Recently, an increasing number of researchers have started to argue that co-speech gestures may indeed be multi-functional. It is therefore ever more important to investigate under which circumstances gestures fulfil which kinds of functions, and to what extent they are influenced by both speaker-internal processes and social-interactional processes. Two experimental studies will be presented which feed into this debate. The variable manipulated in both studies is common ground, i.e., the knowledge, assumptions and beliefs that interactants in a conversation share and know that they share (e.g., Clark, 1996). The first study to be presented investigates the role co-speech gestures play when common ground exists from the outset of a conversation, how and why gestures are used by speakers in this context, and how common ground influences the representation of semantic information in gesture and speech. A second study examines the influence of common ground which accumulates over the course of a conversation on interactants’ use of gesture and speech in face-to-face dialogue, and in particular on mirrored gestural forms, their functions, and the convergence of interactants’ gestural representations. |
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| homepage: | www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ |