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An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech

Authors:
Walter, S., S. Hinterwimmer

Year / Status:
2025

Journal / Venue:
Proceedings of Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 3, Philadelphia, PA: UPenn

DOI / URL:
10.3765/elm.3.5757

Open Data:
https://osf.io/7hwjz/

Abstract

Hinterwimmer et al. (2021) experimentally investigated the hypothesis that perspective in gesture and speech is by default aligned, i.e., when a character’s or protagonist’s perspective is conveyed in the speech signal, this utterance is preferably aligned with a character viewpoint gesture. If an utterance expresses an observer’s perspective, by contrast, it is more likely accompanied by an observer viewpoint gesture. Their results, however, showed an overall preference for character viewpoint gestures. They argued that there were pragmatic factors (e.g., informativity) at play blocking the hypothesized perspective alignment. The study reported here further investigates Hinterwimmer et al.’s (2021) hypothesis by comparing two different character viewpoint gestures paired with a verbal utterance in a rating study. The results suggest that, contrary to Hinterwimmer et al.’s (2021) hypothesis, multiple, potentially non-aligned perspectives can be simultaneously expressed in gesture and speech.