ABSTRACT
This chapter determines whether speakers encode the most significant aspects of a story in gesture by experimentally manipulating the importance of individual semantic elements in the story by making them more or less relevant to the outcome of the story. It examines a direct experimental test of the hypothesis that in stories where the individual semantic features are crucial to the outcome of the story, these features should be more likely to be encoded in gesture compared with stories in which they are not crucial. The chapter illustrates that encoding of the critical semantic information in gesture alone did differentiate between the consequential and neutral versions of the story in a way that speech or dual encoding did not. Participants were more likely to encode the semantic information in gesture only when it was critical to the outcome of the story.
