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Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?

Abstract This study explores the fundamental nature of the iconic gestures that speakers produce alongside speech in story-telling by analyzing whether these gestures are sensitive to the judged importance of individual elements in a story. The study focused on two individual semantic features, namely “size” and “relative position” and identified each and every instance of these in 180 narrations and analyzed whether these were encoded in speech, in gesture, or in speech and gesture. ‘Importance’ was assessed by asking ten judges (per story) to identify the five most important instances of “size” and the five most important instances of “relative position” and this was used, employing various statistical algorithms, to calibrate the significance of each element of the story. The study found that overall gestures were significantly more likely to encode high importance information than medium or low importance information. This was also found with the semantic feature “size” considered on its own but there was a reversal of this trend when “relative position” information was considered separately. An explanation is offered for this reversal in terms of the way that gestures encode position information in the first place.