Have you ever noticed what your hands are doing while you speak, or maybe you don’t even realize because it is so natural. How about your professors hands while you watch them give a lecture? You might notice that every time you are in science class or maybe even history, your teacher uses their hands while speaking. In fact, funnily enough there have been many instances where teachers will knock something over with their hands while making these motions, or even spill hot coffee on themselves. These movements are known as hand gestures, which are a completely natural part of speaking.

Gesturing doesn’t just engage the audience and make your presentation more interesting, but it actually enhances your speech and helps facilitate what you are going to say. Some researchers have dove into understanding why gesturing occurs. Jana Iverson and colleagues (2001) believe that maybe people gesture because they see others gesture and learn from this model to move their hands (Iverson et al., 2001). They also think that people might gesture because they recognize gestures could be useful to the listener (Iverson et al., 2001). However, Iverson et al. (2001) found that through testing blind speakers, whom had never even seen gestures, did indeed gesture as they spoke, even conveying the same amount of gestures as sighted speakers. These finding demonstrate that gesturing is a natural part of the speaking process, and is not restricted to communicating to listeners, but also a huge part for speakers (Iverson et al., 2001).

Gestures can help strengthen what someone is saying and usually used to emphasize a specific point. It is important to note that gestures differ from someone who is manually signing with their hands, such as American Sign Language (ASL). In ASL, the motion of your hands actually conveys a specific word, however gesturing is not its own language and usually only used to aid what you are explaining.

Many studies have shown that those who are good public speakers use their hands, and people can actually recall much more often what you were speaking about when hands gestures are used. Interestingly enough, hand gestures have actually been spoken about as occurring before language was even a thing, and that is what helped to create the start of language. This is known as the gesture first theory, the idea that iconic visible gestures had something to do with the origin of language, and in particular, speech (Armstrong, 2008). This theory says that during evolution, signs were illustrations of things they referred to. At a certain stage, sounds came to be associated with the visible sign and what it is referring to (Armstrong, 2008). Gesturing has been around for a long time, and many empirical studies focus on how these gestures can help facilitate what exactly it is that you are going to say.

Frances Rauscher and colleagues (1996) looked more in depth about how gesturing affects speech and the positive implications it can have when one does use their hands. Rauscher et al. (1996) define conversational gestures as unplanned, fluent hand movements that accompany spontaneous speech (Rauscher et al., 1996). However, there are two different types of gestures that can occur while speaking. You might notice that whether it is you or someone else talking, there are movements of the hands in which an individual isn’t actually referring to anything in specific, yet their hands are motioning in different ways during speech. These are known as motor movements, or beat gestures (Rauscher et al., 1996). These gestures are simply when you are moving your hands but it doesn’t look like anything. They are simple, brief and unrelated to the content of what is being spoken about (Rauscher et al., 1996). On the other hand, there are movements of the hands in which refer to something that is being spoken about, and tend to be longer in duration. For example, if you are talking about someone throwing an object and you make the motion of you throwing an item, or if you were speaking about receiving something you might make a motion with your hands coming towards your body. These gestures are known as lexical movements, in other words, gestures that map on to the ideas of what you are talking about (Rauscher et al., 1996).

Rauscher et al. (1996) looks into the idea that these specific gestures-lexical movements- actually play a role in retrieving the word from your mental dictionary. In order to test this, participants were prevented from gesturing while attempting to describe a scene from the cartoon, Wile E Coyote: The Classic Chase. One way to test this out on your own is to sit down with a friend and have a conversation. However, make sure you sit on your hands. Do you notice anything? Most people will observe, first of all, that they didn’t even realize how much they actually use their hands while speaking. Secondly, what happens for most is that since the hands are being restricted from use, individuals will start making other types of movements whether it be moving up and down or a making a change in facial expression, and maybe for some, they might have had trouble speaking or thinking of what words to use. This is because your hands are not available and gesturing helps to facilitate your access to words in speech.

In the current study, Rauscher at al. (1996) had participants describe what they had watched in 3 different conditions. Since experimenters were testing to see if gesturing aided in facilitating lexical retrieval, they had to make lexical access more difficult. To do so, the conditions consisted of a normal speech condition (no restraints), an obscure speech condition (use as many obscure words as possible), and a constrained-speech condition (avoid using words that contained c & d) (Rauscher et al., 1996). The participants were allowed to use their hands for each condition, and then the use of hands was prevented for the next set of trials.

Results showed a common pattern when gesturing was allowed. Findings show that when participants gestured, they had far less dysfluencies than when they did not gesture (Rauscher et al., 1996). Gesturing also helped to speak faster (Rauscher et al, 1996). Results indicate that speech production and gesture production systems interact very closely. Gesturing helps by priming the word that you are about to say. So, for example, by gesturing the movements of throwing a ball, you are giving yourself a prime for the specific word(s) and in turn this will help you get to those words faster and more accurately. Therefore, gestures usually happen earlier than the actual speech and stop moving when the word that you are referring to is said.

Additional studies support this idea of priming. Geoffrey Beattie et al. (1999) explain that gestures are products of the lexical pre-planning process and seem to indicate that the speaker knows in advance the meaning and make up of the word they will say, and therefore gesturing helps to produce that word through speech. Beattie et al. (1999) gives an example of an individual saying the sentence, “When certain problems can be raised”. They explain that the speaker gestures a raising of his hand during the sentence, however the gesture occurs before the word “raise” and rather on the word “certain” (Beattie et al., 1999). Beattie and colleagues (1999) point out an important notion, which led to this conclusion. There is a strong association between iconic gestures, one that is related to the content of what is being spoken about, and particular words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which contain the most unpredictable items in speech (Beattie et al, 1999). Therefore, gesturing will occur prior to what is about to be said, and in turn help you access and say that word with much more ease.

Although the production of meaningful gestures has been found to enhance lexical access, interestingly enough, there have been other studies that examine whether these meaningless gestures, which we identified as motor movements, help facilitate lexical retrieval as well. Susan Ravizza (2003) tested to see if movements in general would improve lexical access if someone were in a tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT), which is when you know what you want to say but you can’t retrieve the word from your mental dictionary. It has happened to all of us, for example if you are trying to think of a word and you know it, it’s right there, but you just can’t say it. Some people call this a brain fart. For some individuals, when this happens, they might snap, others might tap their feet, but mostly everyone makes some type of movement. Ravizza (2003) found that these meaningless movements can actually facilitate lexical retrieval (Ravizza, 2003). However, it is important to note that movements such as these, ones that do not map on to what you are saying, may only help in cases in which a word has been selected in your head, but you are having trouble activating it (Ravizza, 2003). Pierre Feyereisen (2006) supports this idea, saying that TOT states trigger motor activity like iconic gestures, face touching, and fidgeting, and therefore difficulties in finding a word might facilitate gesture production (Feyereisen, 2006).

Further studies have also been completed demonstrating gestures that accompany speech both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. Karen Pine et al. (2013) completed a study in which participants had to name degraded images of objects when using a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent, and when not making any hand gestures (Pine et al., 2013). Their reaction time was recorded. Participants named objects significantly faster when adopting a congruent gesture than when not gesturing at all, and using an incongruent hand gesture resulted in slower naming times (Pine et al., 2013). These results demonstrate that by gesturing, the participant was able to prime the word they wanted to say, and in turn name the images at a much faster pace (Pine et al., 2013). Pine and colleagues (2013) exemplify that gesturing is an integral part of a speaker’s cognitive process (Pine et al., 2013).

So, next time you have to speak in public, or maybe have a class presentation, remember that letting your hands do the talking can benefit you. It will not only help the audience better understand what you are speaking about, but it will help you to prime the words that you need to access, allowing you to speak with accuracy, fluency, and confidence.

References:

Armstrong, D. (2008). The Gestural Theory of Language Origins. Sign Language Studies, 8 (3), 289-314.

Beattie, G., Coughlan, J. (1999). An experimental investigation of the role of iconic gestures in lexical access using the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. British Journal of Psychology, 90 (1), 35-56.

Feyereisen, P. (2006). How could gesture facilitate lexical access? Advances In Speech-Language Pathology, 8 (2), 128-133.

Iverson, J., Goldin-Meadow, S. (2001). The resilience of gesture in talk: gesture in blind speakers and listeners. Developmental Science, 4 (4), 416-422.

Pine, K., Reeves, L., Howlett, N., Fletcher, B. (2013). Giving cognition a helping hand: The effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval. British Journal of Psychology, 104 (1), 57-68.

Rauscher, F., Krauss, R., Chen, Y. (1996). Gesture, speech, and lexical access: The role of lexical movements in speech production. Psychological Science, 7 (4), 226-231.

Ravizza, S. (2003). Movement and lexical access: Do noniconic gestures aid in retrieval. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10 (3), 610-615.