Researchers involved: Mailin Antomo, Yuqiu Chen (Lying, Deceiving, Misleading, Georg-August-University Göttingen), Vinicius Macuch-Silva (ViCom Post-Doc-Fellow)
The collaboration brings together two related projects. The first project addresses whether gestures can be perceived as lies and whether gestural content involves commitment. The second project addresses the multimodal marking of epistemic stance. We plan to join forces to investigate whether recurrent gestures affect perceived speaker commitment, looking at the interpretation of utterances with and without a particular recurrent gesture, namely the ring precision grip. Recurrent gestures are relevant to the study of language use not only as they show a high degree of conventionalization between their forms and meanings (Bressem & Müller, 2014; Ladewig, 2014) but also as, unlike other highly conventionalized gestures like emblems or deictic gestures (see Gawne & Cooperrider, 2024 for emblems), the meanings they express tend to be pragmatic in nature.
The ring family of so-called precision grip gestures is a case in point as to the pragmatic relevance of recurrent gestures: these gestures, which prototypically involve the index finger connecting to the thumb and forming a ring shape, express precision and are often used to highlight the information-structural status of units in discourse (Lempert, 2011). In particular, they can be used to focus an element within an utterance and to contrast that same element with other elements already introduced in the discourse. This research question extends the scope of both projects and offers a new and promising avenue for future research on pragmatics and gesture.
We plan to set up and conduct a web-based experiment addressing how German speakers perceive utterances with and without ring precision grip gestures (RPGG). We expect that ring gestures, when used to mark contrast between a focused element and previous material in the discourse context, modulate the degree to which a producer is perceived to be committed to the content of the utterance containing the focused element.
We plan to conduct a one-shot, between-participants experiment where each participant sees only one trial: assuming four conditions (see below), 10 items per condition, and 10 data points per item (for each dependent variable), we expect 400 participants in total. In our task, participants are presented with a written background sentence introducing a topic (e.g., the number of people being laid off in a company), which is then picked up in the target sentence, presented as video clip. Crucially, the target sentence includes a focused element which contrasts what has been established by the background sentence.
After watching the video clip, participants are asked to rate to what extent they think the person uttering the target sentence can (a) deny the content of their utterance and (b) be held accountable for the same content, using a 7-point rating scale. We manipulate between participants the type of commitment marker included in the target sentence:
– Condition 1: ring gesture
– Condition 2: commitment-neutral, non-recurrent gesture
– Condition 3: no gesture and no verbal marker
– Condition 4: no gesture and a verbal marker
Our predictions are as follows:
(1) When producing an utterance with a ring gesture, people will be perceived as less able to deny the content of their utterance and more accountable for that same content compared to when producing an utterance without either a gesture or a verbal marker of commitment.
(2) When producing an utterance with a ring gesture, people will be perceived as less able to deny the content of their utterance and more accountable for that same content compared to when producing an utterance with a gesture with a non-recurrent form-meaning mapping.
(3) When producing an utterance with a ring gesture, people will be perceived as more able to deny the content of their utterance and less accountable for that same content compared to when producing an utterance without a gesture but with a verbal marker of commitment.
Sample item
You and a work colleague are discussing a layoff that is rumored to be announced soon by your company management. While you heard that 10 people are going to be laid off, your colleague says:
(i) [16 people] will be laid off. [RPGG]
(ii) [16 people] will be laid off. [non-recurrent gesture]
(iii) 16 people will be laid off.
(iv) 16 people will certainly be laid off.