著者

喜多 壮太郎

出版者

日本認知科学会

雑誌

認知科学 (ISSN:13417924)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, no.1, pp.9-21, 2000

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This paper reviews the literature on gesture in order to elucidate the reasons why people gesture. Two major classes of reasons are explored: communicative and cognitive. One of the main communicative functions of gesture is to help achieve the act of conveying some content to others. First, gestures can encode, in various ways, the information to be conveyed, and become the main vehicle of “content delivery”. Second, gesture can regulate the way the content is conveyed to others. For example, gesture regulates the division of labor between gesture and speech with respect to the content delivery. It also regulates and supplements the content delivery in the speech channel (e.g., managing turns in conversation, marking illocutionary force of an utterance). Another main communicative function is to create an affective “bonding” among communicative partners. This is achieved by producing the same body movement synchronously. As for the cognitive function, gesturing helps the conceptual planning for speech production. It is argued that gesture is a form of thinking, “spatio-motoric thinking”, which is based on our ability to maneuver the body in the environment. This is qualitatively different from the “analytic thinking”, the manipulation of abstract propositional representation. In the course of speech production, these two kinds of thinking collaboratively seek the “package” of information that fits the expressive resources of the language. Because the two forms of thinking have ready access to different organizations of information, it is advantageous for speaker to run both of them simultaneously.