Gestural modality and addressee perspective influence how we reason about time

Abstract

AbstractA growing body of literature has established that spatiotemporal metaphoric reasoning processes can be affected by the active experience of motion (such as actual motion, fictive motion, and abstract motion). In this study, the effects of metaphoric gestures on spatiotemporal metaphor use and the effects of addressee perspective on comprehension of these gestures are investigated. Participants were asked an ambiguous question that yields different responses depending on which metaphor variant is used. This question was asked with simultaneously produced metaphoric gestures depicting either sagittal or lateral motion and presented to participants either in shared perspective (side by side) or opposing (face to face) perspective. Findings suggest that not only does gesture influence metaphoric reasoning in discourse interpretation, but that addressees reliably interpret gestures from their own perspective, even when it is not shared with the speaker. Furthermore, conversational bystanders similarly adopt the perspective of the addressee in gesture comprehension.