ABSTRACT
The experiments that the author describes reveal something of the nature, depth and range of information conveyed by iconic gestures. At one level, it lends considerable support to David McNeill's basic idea that such iconic gestures are crucial to meaning. McNeill carried out very few experiments to determine how listeners deal with the information contained within speech and within gestures. The Krauss study only investigated semantic relationships between speech and gesture, the semantic relationships between the two channels of communication. Attributes like the relative position of the people and objects and the size of the people and objects depicted were significantly communicated right across the sample of gestures. Participants in the experiment who were presented with clips of gesture, speech combinations from a speaker telling a story based on a storyboard got significantly more information about the original story than those who only heard the speech. Some gestures were more communicative than others.
