Speakers gesture at high rates when explaining their solutions to spatial problems. The present work investigates one possible explanation for why speakers gesture so frequently during spatial problem solving, namely, that when speakers imagine the problem components in motion, they are particularly likely to gesture. We compared speakers’ gesture rates as they actively solved a mental rotation...

This study investigated hemispheric lateralization in comprehending and evaluating lecture material with and without nonverbal hand gestures. Participants watched a lecture with and without gesture under conditions of cognitive load in the left or right hemisphere. There were no effects of gesture or load on lecture comprehension, but gesture and load influenced how participants evaluated the l...

This study investigates the habitual expressions of metaphors in language and gesture and the collaboration of these two modalities in conveying metaphors. This study examined 247 metaphoric expressions in Mandarin conversations. The data includes 110 (44.5%) metaphors being conveyed concurrently by speech and gesture as well as 137 (55.5%) metaphors being conveyed in gesture exclusively. Resul...

Humans perform iconic gestures to refer to entities through embodying their shapes. For instance, people often gesture the outline of an object (e.g. a circle for a ball) when referring to it during communication. In this paper, we present a gesture-based object recognition algorithm that enables natural human-computer interaction involving iconic gestures. Based on our analysis of multiple ges...