ABSTRACT

Word finding in speech is a routine but complex part of our everyday life. There appears to be a strong association between the presence of iconic gestures and particular form classes of words, particularly nouns, verbs and adjectives, the classes which contain the words most difficult to retrieve in speech. This led a number of psychologists to suggest that one of the main functions of the gestures was the mapping out of images to help with word finding. Iconic gestures do not seem to assist the speaker in retrieving words from the mental dictionary, although they are common when speakers are having word-finding difficulties. Iconic gestures may be involved in the generation of speech, a process that is otherwise notoriously difficult to study. In laboratory the authors investigated whether permitting participants to use gestures in the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state affects the rate at which they resolve the state, and whether iconic gestures function effectively in finding words in mental dictionary.