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Effects of gesture restriction on quality of narrative production Theodore Jenkins, Marie Coppola, and Carl Coelho University of Connecticut

Hand gestures have been found to provide both semantic information and cognitive facilitative effects in language tasks. These benefits, however, have typically been linked to micro-levels of word and sentence production, and little attention has been paid to the macro-levels of narrative production and organization. In this study, we examined the length, content, syntactic complexity, and organization of narratives of ten typically developing adults under two conditions: (i) Free Gesture, in which participants were allowed to gesture freely while retelling a story, and (ii) Restricted Gesture, where the participants were prevented from moving their hands freely. Results indicated that although narrative length and content did not vary significantly between conditions, narratives produced in the Free Gesture condition were significantly more grammatically complex and better organized than those produced in the Restricted Gesture condition. The findings are discussed with respect to the potential facilitative cognitive effects of gesture for discourse planning. Keywords: gesture, discourse, narrative organization, gesture restriction, syntactic complexity

Introduction Mounting evidence suggests that gesture is a communicative modality that adds to the spoken message. Hand gestures and other body movements frequently accompany speech and communicate information that is often not redundant with speech (McNeill, 1992). Gestures coupled with spoken language have been shown to enhance communicative exchanges for both the speaker and listener during spoken language (Kita et al., 2007; Alibali, Heath, & Myers, 2001). Additionally, gesture facilitates cognition and improves performance in several different tasks. For example, one study found that participants had better recall after learning

Gesture 16:3 (2017), 416–431. doi 10.1075/gest.00003.jen issn 1568–1475 / e-issn 1569–9773 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Effects of gesture restriction on quality of narrative production 417

unfamiliar words in a foreign language when they were paired with an iconic gesture (e.g., hammer paired with a pounding motion; Kelly, McDevitt, & Esch, 2009). In addition, lexical retrieval is aided by active gestures in word recall tasks (FrickHorbury & Guttentag, 1998) and there is evidence of positive effects for learning mathematics skills when children explained their strategies with an accompanying hand movement (Broaders et al., 2007). Gesture has often been studied in relation to speech at the level of individual words or sentences. The developmental literature provides many examples of how active gesture is tied to language growth in young children. For example, gesture production predicts lexical and syntactic development in early language acquisition (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). In studies of language intervention for individuals with aphasia, there is utility in using iconic or representational gestures to facilitate single word production (Rose & Douglas, 2001). On a sentential level, gesture can visually represent spatial information for direction and manner in spoken verbs of motion that don’t necessarily semantically encode that information (i.e., path and satellite verbs; Özyürek & Kita, 1999). Additionally, it has been noted that gestures accompanying repeated spatial verb phrases frequently changed form according to variability in addressee location and specific verb particles (e.g., move into → move out; Özyürek, 2002). In his seminal work, McNeill (1992) examined how gestures could encode spatial information in the context of single utterances taken from longer story retellings. Several subsequent studies applied similar linguistic analyses to McNeill’s. For example, Özyürek et al. (2005) examined cross-cultural and linguistic differences in gesture types, but again in the context of single utterances. To date gesture use has not been examined directly in narrative discourse structure. McNeill et al. (2001) describes how gesture can contribute to a related set of utterances, in which specific morphological forms of gestures are repeated over a discourse; these gesture forms are known as catchments. For example, Quek et al. (2002) examined a single case of a speaker who was asked to describe her living quarters. Across several utterances, the speaker repeatedly used specific onehanded gestures when describing a particular area of her home. This particular case seems to suggest that gesture forms may have a cognitive representation in the mind of the speaker. Similar claims have been made in the Information Packaging Hypothesis, which posits the occurrence of gesture as a way of aiding in the organization and communication of spatial information (Kita, 2000). Mol and Kita (2012) noted that pairing motion gestures with speech would lead to an utterance with fewer clauses (i.e., gesture communicated more efficiently). Active gesture is thought to act as a heuristic for thinking and may free up cognitive resources. If we apply this notion of gesture to discourse production, gesture may facilitate the production of more complex narratives. To the authors’ knowledge, little work has

418 Theodore Jenkins, Marie Coppola, and Carl Coelho

been done to examine the potential interaction of discourse structure and gesture production. Given that gesture can facilitate general thinking on micro-level language tasks (e.g., single word production in young children; Morford & GoldinMeadow, 1992), might it also affect organization, completeness, and syntactic complexity of narrative discourse? The current study examined the effect of active gesturing on the quality of discourse production by manipulating the free use of hand movement during story retell.

Method Participants 10 undergraduate students (3 male) were recruited from the University of Connecticut to participate in the study. All participants were between 18 and 30 years old, were native speakers of English, and had no history of neurological injury.

Stimuli Participants were asked to retell a story presented in a storybook with the text redacted, Old MacDonald had an apartment building (Barret & Barret, 1969). The sequence of pictures depicts the story of the characters Old MacDonald and his wife moving into an apartment complex in a city. MacDonald then starts planting produce in the vacant apartments, herding livestock in the halls, and eventually pushes out all his neighbors. The story itself has been used in other discourse studies to elicit a narrative sample in both typical and atypical populations (e.g., Lê et al., 2012; Coelho et al., 2013).

Procedure In two different sessions, each participant was presented with the picture story, without the accompanying story text, and was asked to review them at their own pace. Then the book was taken away, and each participant was asked to recount the story as best they could to an unfamiliar listener. Participants were specifically instructed to create a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Each narrative was produced to a different listener for each session, and the two sessions occurred at least 7 days apart to minimize the participants’ reduction of their narrative due to their familiarity with the book/story.


There were two conditions for the experiment: (i) Free Gesture, and (ii) Restricted Gesture. Gesture restriction was achieved by having each participant grip the bottom of their seat while they retold the story, in effect restricting gesture production. If a participant’s hands came off the seat for whatever reason, they were reminded to keep their hands on the bottom of the chair. In the Free Gesture condition, nothing was done or said to encourage or discourage gesture, and participants’ hands were not restricted. To control for any potential cognitive load associated with maintaining the hands in the Restricted Gesture condition, participants in the Free Gesture condition were required to keep their feet in the same position throughout the task. These positions were indicated via a mat with footmarks placed directly in front of the participant. Finally, condition order was counterbalanced across the participants (i.e., 5 participants completed the Free Gesture condition first, and vice versa). In a recent study, the potential effects of gesture restriction order in a similar narrative task, with typical and autistic populations, was studied (de Marchena, 2013). Briefly, story length (i.e., word count) was examined in both of these groups for narrative recountings of several cartoon stimuli. Interestingly, the author reported an effect of condition order (i.e., Free Gesture vs. Restricted Gesture). The analysis showed a main effect for condition order, specifically driven by the restricted gesture condition (i.e., no significant differences between the Free Gesture conditions). Furthermore, during the first condition type (both free and restricted gesture) longer narratives were observed, albeit not always significantly so. Findings suggest that condition order may play a role on the cognitive load associated with the task. Analysis of the data took this into account.

Coding and analysis Gesture segmentation Based on McNeill’s (1992) discussion of gesture structure, a hand movement was classified as a gesture if it was: (i) co-verbal with speech, and (ii) had a discernable stroke of movement. No attempt in this study was made to classify the type of gesture (see McNeill, 1992, for review). The analyses in this study were based solely on gesture frequency.


Discourse analysis Following methods in Lê, et al. (2011), we used three measures of discourse structure; grammatical complexity, story organization, and number of novel propositions:

Grammatical complexity Narratives were transcribed and segmented for basic T-Units. A T-Unit is defined as a main clause with any subordinated clauses (Table 1). Table 1. Examples of subordinated clauses; subordinated clauses are marked in bolded text Number of subordinated clauses

Example

0

Old MacDonald lived in an apartment building.

1

Old MacDonald lived in an apartment building that he owned.

2

Old MacDonald, who was married, lived in an apartment building that he owned.

The grammatical complexity of each narrative was defined as the total number of subordinated clauses in each narrative.

Story organization Story Grammar was the primary measure of organization. Each narrative typically includes a series of episodes that express the different events that occurred. These episodes have an internal structure composed of: Table 2. Narrative episode components 1

Episode component

Definition

Initiating event

A character is motivated to achieve a goal

Example: Old MacDonald missed his farm from the country. 2

Attempt

Attempt to accomplish that goal

Example: Old MacDonald started growing crops in the apartment. 3

Direct Consequence

Marks attainment or non-attainment of the goal

Example: The crops overgrew and forced his tenants out of the building.

A complete episode consisted of all three of these components; episodes that contained fewer than 3 components were considered incomplete. Stories that have more complete episodes than incomplete ones are considered better organized.


Furthermore, narrative samples with the presence of multiple complete episodes were considered to indicate better discourse planning.

Number of novel propositions The number of different events was tabulated in each narrative. For an event to be considered a proposition it must have a clear action and be related to the telling of the story (unrelated tangents to the story were not included, as in the underlined portion of the following example; e.g., Old MacDonald started to grow crops. I don’t like corn, I hope it wasn’t corn.) For example, considering the text in Table 2, this would be exemplary of four different propositions (i.e., (i) Old MacDonald missed farm life; (ii) Old MacDonald grew crops in the apartment; (iii) the crops spread everywhere; (iv) the tenants were forced out of the apartment). If a proposition was repeated in the narrative, it was only counted once. This measure is useful alongside the total T-Units, as it is reflective how much information is actually contained within each narrative that contributed to story development. If free gesture can facilitate the production of more detailed narratives, we would expect the number of T-Units, subordinated clauses, complete episodes, and novel propositions to be greater in the Free Gesture condition. Analysis Comparisons for each discourse measure were analyzed using a two-way Repeated Measures ANOVA. We wanted to account for any possible differences that might have resulted from the ordering of the conditions (i.e., Free Gesture first vs. Restricted Gesture first), therefore we used condition order as a between subjects factor. Specific to subordinate clauses, one may argue that simply producing more language in a narrative may provide more opportunity to produce utterances with subordinated clauses. This in turn may skew the results reported in terms of syntactic complexity. To account for this in our complexity measure, we compared the ratio of the total number of subordinated clauses in a given narrative to the total length of that narrative (i.e., # of Complex Clauses/Total # of T-Units).

Reliability The first author independently coded all of the transcripts for discourse measures and gesture identification. For reliability, two research assistants independently coded the transcripts for different aspects of production. The first research assistant independently coded a subset of the narratives for the discourse measures discussed previously. This research assistant coded 30% of the total transcripts (three from the Free Gesture condition, and three from the Restricted Gesture condition;


i.e., six out of the total twenty). Agreement between raters exceeded 95% for all discourse measures. The second research assistant independently coded all of the transcripts in the Free Gesture condition for gesture identification (there were no gestures to code in the Restricted Gesture condition). Agreement for gesture identification exceeded 96%.

Results Gesture frequency In the Free Gesture condition, the total number of gestures produced varied among participants, and ranged from 3 to 81 (Figure 1). 90

NUMBER OF GESTURES

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1

2

3

4

5 6 PARTICIPANTS

7

8

9

10

Avg

Figure 1. Total number of gestures (Free Gesture condition only)

Discourse measures Narrative length The length of the narrative (i.e., total number of T-Units), in all conditions, varied among speakers (Free: 12–65; Restricted: 6–68; Figure 2). However, there were no main effects for gesture restriction (F(1, 4) = 2.688, p = .176) or for condition order (F(1, 4) = .841, p = .411) suggesting that gesture use didn’t have any effect on the length of the narrative. Interestingly, there was a significant interaction effect (F(1, 4) = 46.000, p = .002). This might suggest that there is some influence of condition ordering on the length of some narratives, despite that there was no main effect for order. However, length is arguably a coarse measure for narrative content and may not be appropriately reflective of the data. Additionally, there was no such


interaction effect, based on other measures of narrative content (i.e., number of novel propositions, episode length, and contributing T-Units; see below). Finally, given the limited number of participants in the study (n = 10), we argue that such a trend must be interpreted cautiously. 40 NUMBER OF T-UNITS

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Free Gesture

Retricted Gesture CONDITION

Figure 2. Mean number of T-Units per condition

Number of novel propositions There were no main effects for gesture restriction (F(1, 4) = .323, p = .600), or condition order (F(1, 4) = 1.217, p = .332), or an interaction effect (F(1, 4) = .124, p = .743) on the number of novel propositions. This supports the previous claim that the content of narratives did not differ between conditions (Figure 3). 16

NUMBER OF NOVEL PROPOSITIONS

14 12

10 8 6 4 2 0

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture CONDITION

Figure 3. Mean number of novel propositions per condition


Narrative complexity It might be argued that simply producing more language in general may allow for more opportunity to produce more utterances with subordinated clauses. To account for this, we divided the total number of complex clauses in each sample by the total length of the narrative (i.e., Subordinated Clauses/Total T-Units). The ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for gesture restriction (F(1, 4) = 23.318, p = .008), but not for condition order (F(1, 4) = .004, p = .953) or an interaction (F(1, 4) = 1.688, p = .264). This suggests that participants in the Free Gesture condition produced significantly more subordinated clauses per total number of T-Units overall compared to the Restricted Gesture condition (Condition Means in Figure 4).

COMPLEX CLAUSES/TOTAL T-UNITS

0.4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture CONDITION

Figure 4. Mean number of subordinated clauses per total T-Units

Narrative organization For both complete and incomplete episodes, there was a significant main effect for gesture restriction (Complete: F(1, 4) = .17.778, p = .014; Incomplete: F(1, 4) = 19.231, p = .012). Additionally, there was no main effect for condition order (Complete: F(1, 4) = .930, p = .389; Incomplete: F(1, 4) = .213, p = .669), nor a significant interaction effect (Complete: F(1, 4) = 1.263, p = .324; Incomplete: F(1, 4) = .026, p = .880). The higher incidence of complete episodes and lower frequency of incomplete episodes in the Free Gesture condition suggests that narrative produced in the Free Gesture condition were better organized than those produced in the Restricted Gesture condition (Figure 5). Additionally, examining the length of each episode revealed no significant main effects for gesture restriction (F(1, 4) = .750, p = .435), condition


6

NUMBER OF EPISODES

5 4 3 2 1 0

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture

COMPLETE EPISODES

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture

INCOMPLETE EPISODES

Figure 5. Number of complete and incomplete episodes

order (F(1, 4) = .023, p = .887), or an interaction effect (F(1, 4) = 3.264, p = .145). (Figure 6). Comparison of the incomplete episodes could not be done with a twoway Repeated Measures ANOVA, since not all participants produced incomplete episodes in the Free Gesture condition for the Free Gesture first group. Therefore, we collapsed the condition order to simply compare gesture conditions in a oneway Repeated Measures ANOVA (i.e., Free vs. Restricted Gesture only). The analysis provided no indication of a difference between conditions for incomplete episodes (F(1) = 3.762, p = .192) (Figure 6). Therefore, we conclude that there is

AVERAGE NUMBER OF T-UNITS PER EPISODE

6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture

COMPLETE EPISODE

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture

INCOMPLETE EPISODE

Figure 6. Average number of T-Units per episode in either condition


no evidence that episode length varied significantly between conditions for either complete or incomplete episodes.

Percentage of T-units contributing to episode structure To examine if the total number of T-Units was contributing to the telling of the actual story, we used a measure called percentage of T-Units contributing to the episode structure. For a T-Unit to be considered “productive” in this manner it must be part of an episode, whether it is complete or incomplete. We include both incomplete and complete episodes under the assumption that if it is contributing to any episode structure it is productive to the telling of the story. However, there were no significant main effects for gesture restriction (F(1, 4) = .300, p = .613), condition order (F(1, 4) = .287, p = .621), or an interaction effect (F(1, 4) = .185, p = .689) (Figure 7). 100

Percent Contributing T-Units

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Free Gesture

Restricted Gesture Condition

Figure 7. Percentage of T-Units that contributed to an episode

Discussion The results indicated that participants allowed to gesture freely (Free Gesture) during discourse production used significantly more sentential subordination and produced better organized narratives than they did when they were not allowed to gesture (Restricted Gesture). In accordance with the current literature, our results suggest that gesture is linked to increased spoken language productivity at the sentence level via increased sentential complexity (e.g., Kita, 2000). A novel finding of the present study is the evidence suggesting positive connections between Free Gesture narrative organization as seen in the number of more complete and


fewer incomplete story episodes throughout the Free Gesture narratives. Notably, we observed these effects despite the absence of significant differences for content (i.e., number of novel propositions) or percentage of contributing T-Units between conditions. Additionally, the length of narratives overall (i.e., number of T-units) nor episodes (both complete and incomplete) did not differ between gesture conditions. Overall, all of these results suggest that Free Gesture is positively linked with increased micro- and macro-levels of discourse production, but not necessarily of content and length. There are several potential explanations for these findings. First, the gestural restriction may have introduced some artificial cognitive load for each speaker. Perhaps purposefully restraining extremity movements might have taken some attention away from language organization in general. However if this were the case, then limb restriction in general may be the cause for such differences in discourse planning. However we controlled for this by introducing a foot restriction in the Free Gesture condition. Therefore extremity restriction in general does not appear to be a reasonable explanation for these differences. Alternatively, restricting the hands from movement may have reduced the ability of each speaker to communicate as efficiently as possible. McNeill (1992) suggests that gesture and spoken language are cognitively planned simultaneously. Furthermore, certain types of information (e.g., spatial) may be better communicated through speech with concurrent gesture (Kita, 2000). For example, Özyürek and Kita (1999) noted that English and Turkish speakers in a language task frequently talk about actions with gestures that encode visual information expressing elements of manner and or path (see introduction). Additionally, Mol and Kita (2012) found speakers produced fewer spoken utterances when gestures simultaneously communicated information about both the manner and path of a verb, than they did when their gestures that focused on manner or path separately. This bimodal encoding is theorized to allow for efficient transmission of information, and results in less information being expressed in the spoken language (Kita, 2000). Our results indicated that the freedom to gesture might have provided an opportunity to produce utterances with more subordinated clauses. Although, this is not literally what Mol and Kita found in their data (i.e., gesture leads to fewer utterances), it may be consistent with our findings. Our data suggest that gesture is associated with better language production by allowing more sentential subordination, which leads to the production of more complex utterances. Constraining one modality altogether (i.e., gesture), as we did in our study, may inherently have taxed the other modality (i.e., a spoken utterance). If this was the case, then that may have created a higher cognitive load at the sentential level. This in turn may have indirectly inhibited mental resources from being applied toward macro-levels of discourse planning (i.e., episode structure).


Finally, it may be the case the hands provide some embodied method of thinking. Similar to the work by Broaders et al. (2007), in which children expressed knowledge of more strategies when using gestures in explaining their solutions to math problems, gesture may facilitate language planning on a micro-linguistic scale. This in turn may free up cognitive resources for attention to macro-linguistic planning. Although, our results do not provide a direct link between gesture and discourse planning, it seems to have at least an indirect benefit to larger levels of language planning. The organization measures between conditions suggest that Free Gesture is connected with increased organization (i.e., more complete and fewer incomplete episodes). It should be noted that condition order might influence task performance (i.e., free gesture first vs. restricted gesture first). As mentioned before, de Marchena (2013) reported a main effect of condition order on a similar language task for the length (i.e., number or words) of elicited narratives. However, our analysis did not find a main effect for condition order for any of our discourse measures. Interestingly, there was a significant interaction effect for narrative length (i.e., Total Number of T-Units). This suggests the difference between conditions in a particular condition order was greater than the difference between conditions in the other condition order. Although, this result cannot be ignored, we argue that the length of some narratives may have been influenced by condition order, but the overall content did not vary significantly. Narrative length is a coarse measure for narrative content, and the other measures (i.e., number of novel propositions, episode length, and percentage of contributing T-Units) did not indicate any such difference. Again, this result should be interpreted cautiously because of a small N. However, as reviewed by de Marchena, there is little information in the literature that addresses this issue. Further exploration of this topic is needed. It is important to note that all findings in this study are based on the presence of gesture without specific regard to type (see McNeill, 1992, for review). Although all participants in the Free Gesture condition produced at least one gesture throughout their narratives, we have not attempted to interpret any findings with regard to the specific function of any particular gesture. In the introduction we mention both communicative and cognitively facilitative utilities for hand movements, but the gesture literature does not primarily argue for one purpose over the other. Future directions will include methods to interpret the specific function of gestures within and beyond single sentences in narratives. In summary, hand gestures are a natural part of language. Although, there are individual differences in frequency, gesture production has facilitative effects for communication and thinking. As seen in our data, restricting the hands specifically (vs. other limbs) seemed to have repercussions on discourse complexity and


organization. Manual gestures appear to have an important relationship with the production of narrative discourse.

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Authors’ addresses Theodore Jenkins Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences University of Connecticut 850 Bolton Road, U-1085 Storrs, CT 06269 USA [email protected]

Marie Coppola Department of Psychological Sciences and Department of Linguistics University of Connecticut 406 Babbidge Road, U-1020 Storrs, CT 06269 USA [email protected]

Carl Coelho Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences University of Connecticut 850 Bolton Road, U-1085 Storrs, CT 06269 USA [email protected]


Biographical notes Theodore Jenkins is a doctoral student in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Currently, he is a student fellow at the University’s Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences program (IBACS). His research interests involve examining the potential cognitive and linguistic roles that hand gestures have for language planning in Persons with Aphasia. Marie Coppola, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychological Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Coppola is a developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist who investigates the roles of conventional gesture, pantomime, and patterns of social interaction in the emergence of homesign systems and the new Deaf community sign language in Nicaragua. She is also the founder and executive director of Manos Unidas (www. manos-unidas.org), a 501c3 non-profit organization that promotes equal access to language and education for deaf children in Nicaragua. Carl Coelho, PhD, is a speech-language pathologist who has worked clinically and conducted research in the area of acquired brain injury for over 30 years. He has published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. Coelho is a Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Currently he is an Associate Investigator on the Longitudinal Study of TBI at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, MD. Coelho is also a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and a recipient of Honors of the Academy of Neurologic Communication Disorders and Sciences.