Research on Language and Social Interaction

ISSN: 0835-1813 (Print) 1532-7973 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hrls20

Introduction to the Special issue: Gesture and

Understanding in Interaction

Adam Kendon

To cite this article: Adam Kendon (1994) Introduction to the Special issue: Gesture and
Understanding in Interaction, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 27:3, 171-173, DOI:
10.1207/s15327973rlsi2703_1

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi2703_1

Published online: 14 Jun 2010.

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 Research on Language and Social Interaction, 27(3), 171-173
Copyright ID1994, Lawrence Erlbaun~Associates, Inc.

Introductioin to the Special Issue:

Gesture and Understanding in
Interaction
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.Adam Kendon
Philadelphia, PA

The four articles that appear in this issue deal with the question of
whether, and how, recipiedts of the utterances of others are affected in
their understanding by the gestures that often occur as a part of them.
The idea of publishing a group of articles on this topic arose when a
panel on this question was held as a special session at the meeting of the
International Communication Association held in Washington, DC in
May 1993. This panel was organized by Janet Bavelas after discussions
with Adam Kendon. There were contributions from David McNeill with
Justine Cassell, from Jiirgen Streeck, and from Janet Bavelas and Adam
Kendon. The article by ~ c N e i l and
l his colleagues and the article by
Streeck are revisions of papers presented in Washington, DC. The
articles by Kendon and Bavelas are different from the papers they
presented at the panel and have been written afresh for this issue.
Various studies, in which specific examples of the way that gesture
and speech are interrelated have been described, suggest that co-speech
gestures may be richly symbolic and provide information on aspects of
the content of the utterance that is not specified in its spoken component

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Adam Kendon, 43 West Walnut
Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19144.
 172 Adam Kendon

(cf. Calbris, 1990; McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 1993). However, these

studies have rarely addressed directly the question of whether recipients
actually "take up" the information gesture seems to provide. This is a
very difficult question to examine because, as C. Goodwin pointed out
(Goodwin, 1986), recipients of a performance or of talk in conversation
do not make separate responses to the speaker's gestures. They respond
to the discourse or conversational turn as an expression of an integrated
unit of meaning. This means that it is difficult to demonstrate that a
given gesture actually makes a difference in the communication.
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The first article presented here is a review of previous work on this

question. It includes not only a consideration of the experimental work
but also of some of the observational studies that have appeared in
recent years, in which detailed descriptions of turn-taking sequences in
conver'sation are reported. These studies show how it is possible to
discern the way in which a gesture may be important, communicatively,
at a given moment in an interaction, by an analysis of the recipient's
behavior coincident with the unfolding turn at talk. It is suggested that
when and how gestures play a role in communication in interaction is a
variable matter, dependent upon just how the interaction is structured at
a given moment. Hence case-by-case studies of naturally occurring
instances seem, at present, the best way to proceed if we are to enrich
our undersunding of the diverse roles gestures can play.
In the second article, Janet Bavelas reviews the theoretical and
methodolagical background for some of the work she and her colleagues
~t the University of Victoria have been doing. She argues for a
functional, approach to the study of gesture, pointing out that gestures
m a y have several different. functions ~kndtaneously.Far example, a
giveh gesture may at once play a role in facilitating lexical access for the
speaker, it may communicate something of the speaker's meaning to
another, and also it may play a role in conveying information about the
speaker's immediate intentions with regard to the current turn at talk.
She argues that we cannot expect to understand how gestures may be
m e d g f u l far others if we conside1 them separately from the contexts
in which they occur. She suggests that we may expect that, just as
speakers adjust their talk to a particular addressee at a particular
~ o m e nint conversation, the same thing can be expected of gestures. She
offers a suggestiveexample that illustrates this and then points out some
of the implications for studies that compare gesture use in conditions in
which speakers can, and cannot, see each ather. She concludes with a
summary of her recent work on interactive gestures. This makes clear
 Gesture and Understanding in Interaction 173

the importance of maintaining a sensitivity to the different kinds of

functions gestures may have in any quantitative experimental work.
In the third article, David McNeill, Justine Cassell, and Karl-Erik
McCullough report an experiimental attempt to test whether the under-
standings by observers of ,a speaker are affected by the speaker's
gestures. By comparing disosurses that present "fitting" gestures with
those in which the gestures have been mismatched to the meaning of
their associated phrase, they are able to show that observers report
different meanings accordingly. However, the observers of the discourse
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with mismatched gestures do not act as if they have been presented with
anything abnormal; they inte:grate the information presented in gesture
with that presented in speecli, as they do in the discourse with fitting
gestures. Their results supp~xtthe idea that a recipient of narrative
discourse combines speech and gesture into a single system of meaning.
The article concludes with a brief but stimulating discussion of the idea
that non-redundancy betweein gesture and speech, of which the experi-
mental mismatches presented are an extreme example, is not unusual. It
serves in the process by which recipients arrive at new understandings in
the course of the interaction.,
The final article, by Jiirgen Streeck, exemplifies detailed context
analyses of gesture occurrence in interaction. Streeck shows how, by
careful examination of what recipients are doing at the moment when a
speaker produces a gesture, we can derive evidence as to whether the
gestural component of the utterance is being attended. In the last section
of his article, Streeck lgives an analysis of an example that illustrates how
a speaker may adjust gest~ridperformance, as well as spoken perfor-
mance, according to how recipients are paying attention.
It is hoped that these fotlr articles, taken together, will be useful as
a point of reference for the further study of this intriguing question.

Calbris, G . (1990). Semiotics of l'rench gesture. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.
Goodwin, C. (1986). Gestureas a resource for the organizationof mutual orientation.
Semiotics, 62(1-21, 29-49.
Kendon, A. (1993). Human gestme. In K. R. Gibson & T. Ingold (Eds.), Tools,
language and cognition in human evolution (pp. 43-62). Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mi,vd. Chicago: Chicago University Press.