Encouraging gesture use in a narration task increases speakers gesture rate, gesture salience and the production of representational gestures

Previous work has shown the positive effect of encouraging gestures in performing various tasks; in these studies, the participants generally appeared to gesture more when explicitly asked to do it. However, little attention has been paid to whether encouraging gestures also affects other gesture features, i.e., gesture type and salience. In this paper we explore this issue. Twenty native Italian speakers described the content of short comic strips to a listener in 2 conditions: Non-Encouraging gestures (N); Encouraging gestures (E). Co-speech gestures were manually coded and classified according to gesture type (Representational vs. Non- Representational) and gesture salience (Salient vs Non-Salient). The results show that instructing speakers to gesture led to an increase in gesture rate, in gesture salience, and in the number of representational gestures. By contrast, in the non-encouraging condition the rate of Non-Salient gestures was significantly higher, but no difference was found for Non- Representational gestures.