The role of gesture in spoken communication

This project will examine the role of gesture in spoken communication. Gesture plays a significant role in communication. It complements spoken language, enabling a speaker to convey emotion and add clarity and emphasis.

The proposal will use experiments and/or big data to help understand how speakers use gesture to clarify the meaning of novel phases such as 'click bait'. Such compound nouns are frequently created in English but are often initially highly ambiguous, with subtle meanings quite distinct from that of their constituent words.

This work is timely and important as we increasingly rely on digital communication media, such as videoconferencing, where gesture is more difficult to observe. The work also has importance in virtual worlds, such as the metaverse, which often do not enable users to gesture with the same degree of fidelity as they would in real life).