On the Amount of Semantic Information Conveyed by Gestures

This paper aims at investigating on whether and how semantic information conveyed by gestures supports communication effectiveness. The research hypothesis was operationalized as a word retrieval task. To this aim, 140 subjects (73 males, 67 females) aged between 18 and 35 years were recruited at the University of Salerno (Italy). They underwent a memory task after being requested to watch video-clips explicating 15 every-day words through 4 different presentation modes: a) only audio, b) only gestures, c) audio and articulatory (complex auditory) information, and d) audio, gestures, and articulatory (multimodal) information. It was found that semantic information is most effectively retained when conveyed through the multimodal mode, and that the only gestures outperforms the only audio and complex auditory mode. It was also found that females have higher significant recall ability than males, no matter the experimental condition.