抄録
The purposes of this study are to investigate factors relating to individual variation of the frequency of gestures during speech, and to assess the functions of gestures during speech based on the factors. An experiment was administered to 24 female subjects under two conditions, the face-to-face condition and the non-face-to-face condition. The task was to give an explanation of the meaning of a target word to a listener. The subjects filled in two questionnaires, by which the cognitive style and affiliation with the listener were measured. The observed gestures were classified into representational gestures and beat gestures. The analysis shows that the “analysis and abstraction” factor of the cognitive style correlated with the frequency of representational gestures under both the face-to-face and the non face-to-face conditions, and affiliation correlated with the frequency of representational gestures only under the non-face-to-face condition. That is, the group who scored high in the “analysis and abstraction” factor in the cognitive style questionnaire performed a representational gesture more frequently than the low-score group in both conditions, and the group with a high score in the affiliation factor performed a representational gesture more frequently than the low-score group in the non face-to-face condition. This study indicates that the emergence of gestures during speech is attributed to achievement of communication, but, at the same time, gestures during speech help the speaker to access lexical representation or to represent spatial information for spatio—kinesic thinking. Moreover it raises a question about the validity of the paradigm of previous experiments, which assumed that the gestures which appear in the non face-to-face condition have purely non-communicative speaker-internal functions.
