Gesture and Understanding in Social interaction

This special issue addresses the question of whether and how recipients of the various utterances of others are affected in their understanding by the gestures that often occur as part and parcel of the verbal comments. The articles collected here review previous work on this question, including not only a consideration of the experimental work, but also some of the observational studies that have appeared in recent years, in which detailed descriptions of turn-taking sequences in conversation are reported. After reviewing the theoretical and methodological background, the contributors argue for a functional approach to the study of gesture, noting that gestures may have several different functions simultaneously. Other material presented reports on an experimental attempt to test whether the understandings by observers of a speaker are affected by the speaker's gestures, and exemplifies detailed context analyses of gesture occurrence in interaction.