Construing events first-hand: Gesture viewpoints interact with speech to shape the attribution and memory of agency

Abstract

Beyond conveying objective content about objects and actions, what can co-speech iconic gestures reveal about a speaker’s subjective relationship to that content? The present study explores this question by investigating how gesture viewpoints can inform a listener’s construal of a speaker’s agency. Forty native English speakers watched videos of an actor uttering sentences with different viewpoints—that of low agency or high agency—conveyed through both speech and gesture. Participants were asked to (1) rate the speaker’s responsibility for the action described in each video (encoding task) and (2) complete a surprise memory test of the spoken sentences (recall task). For the encoding task, participants rated responsibility near ceiling when agency in speech was high, with a slight dip when accompanied by gestures of low agency. When agency in speech was low, responsibility ratings were raised markedly when accompanied by gestures of high agency. In the recall task, participants produced more incorrect recall of spoken agency when the viewpoints expressed through speech and gesture were inconsistent with one another. Our findings suggest that, beyond conveying objective content, co-speech iconic gestures can also guide listeners in gauging a speaker’s agentic relationship to actions and events.