Joyrex Labs

Outline

This Page

1. Gesture Overview

1.1 What is a gesture?

A gesture is a non-verbal communicative act. You can establish whether something is communicative by looking at things like eye contact, conversational context, and the reaction of the person being spoken or gestured to. If it isn’t supposed to communicate anything, then it’s not a gesture. For example, a child might reach for an object trying to pick it up, see what it feels like, or move it. These are movements, but not gestures. But, if the child reaches for an object in order to indicate its presence (point or palm) or to express dissatisfaction with its presence (dismiss), then these are gestures. The distinction between gesture and action gets more difficult as the gestures become more complex, the central principle is that a gesture must be primarily communicative.

1.2 Three main categories of gesture

Gestures come in three basic categories: deictic, conventional, and representational. Deictic gestures are gestures that indicate objects in the environment, and they are basically variations on pointing. Conventional gestures are culturally-agreed-upon hand or bodily movements with a specific meaning, like nodding the head to mean yes, shaking the head to mean no, and moving the finger to lips to indicate “be quiet”. If a gesture is conventional, you should be able to understand its meaning just by seeing it in isolation, without knowing any of the context. There should also be a one-to-one correspondence between the gesture and its meaning. So a person may do something that you recognize the meaning of immediately, like scratching their head to indicate contemplation, but because there are so many ways of gesturally indicating contemplation (e.g. rubbing the chin, pointing at forehead, etc.) that it’s not really a conventional gesture in the same way nodding the head is. Representational gestures are called representational because they represent an object, idea, or action that can’t easily be referenced with a deictic or conventional gesture. The movement of these gestures usually calls to mind something about the nature of the object, idea or action being referenced. For example, you could move your arms back and forth to represent running, or you could trace a square in the air with your finger. The aforementioned “thinking” gesture would also be considered representational. There are dozens of gesture types that we code, but nearly all of them fall into one of these three broad categories.

You will also run across a few gestures that don’t fall into these categories: demos, beats and signs. Demos are used to demonstrate a procedure using the actual object(s) involved in that procedure. For example, a parent may tie a shoe very slowly while explaining each step, so a child can see how it’s done. (If the parent demonstrates the procedure in the air, without the shoelaces, it would be iconic.) Beats occur when a person uses their hands (or head) to rhythmically emphasize words in a sentence or mark utterance boundaries. Unlike other gestures, beats do not convey any semantic meaning.

Sometimes you will see signs from American Sign Language, or even baby signs. These are most common in young P3 transcripts. If you’re not sure whether something is a sign, you can Google the words “baby sign” or “ASL” to find a glossary. Or, some pages that have been helpful in the past are Signing Savvy (for ASL) and My Baby Can Talk (for baby sign). In general, demos are coded in a manner similar to representational gestures, while beats and signs are coded in a manner similar to conventionals.