Can you see me now? Good.

So, I always get pretty excited when I’m listening to a conversation and I hear a lot of sentences that end sounding incomplete with a few seconds of silence: “If it’s like this – " Chances are, when I look up from typing, I catch the end of the stroke of some sweeping drawing in the air.

Check this out as an example:

@ 00:21 Pattie (sitting in the middle on the right) says “. . . but this one. . .”

After you see her gesture, you can tell that she is referring to something that happens in the stretching of the rubber band by ‘this one.’

I try not to stare with my mouth gaping open at my table for extended periods of time because I don’t want the teachers to feel watched. But, wow, trying not to watch too much can be a serious challenge. The moments when I lose track of what people are saying because I’m looking at my computer screen really drive home to me the universal presence and importance of nonverbal modes of communication. I can’t understand what people are saying much of the time without watching their gestures!

Being a videographer and taking field notes kind of puts you in a unique place to notice how unnatural it is to listen to a face-face conversation between two or more people when you can’t see their hands.

Gesture plays an important role for not just speakers, but listeners, too. When listeners can see iconic gestures (in addition to speech) they can answer questions more accurately about what happened in a cartoon. Here’s a paper about that:

http://jls.sagepub.com/content/18/4/438.full.pdf+html

(Beattie and Shovelton 1999)

And, are these sentences finished by gestures more common when people are working out physics explanations for the first time? Is it unique when you’re talking about new stuff? Without the “right” words (feature-talk) are people more likely to fill in part of the story with their hands?