ABSTRACT
A selection of metaphoric gestures was chosen from an extensive naturalistic corpus. The selection of the gestures informed the scripts produced, where both the speech and the movement were heavily scripted and choreographed. The gestures were then incorporated into scripts relating to events relevant to everyday student life, including scripts about relationships. The hypothesis that participants will integrate information from both speech and metaphoric gesture, even in the case of a gesture-speech mismatch, was clearly supported in this study. It demonstrated that gesture-speech mismatches influence how a message is subsequently interpreted. One of the few early studies to have studied actual gesture-speech mismatches was conducted by Cassell et al. The study found that gestural messages that mismatched the information contained in the accompanying speech were often represented in listeners' subsequent retelling of the narrative and therefore that the information conveyed in the gestural channel can alter the entire underlying representation of the utterance.
