Ne zaman ve kimin için? El jestlerini anlamada farklılıklar

Speakers use iconic co-speech hand gestures, which are spontaneous hand movements that co-occur with speech and represent concrete object attributes, events, and actions. Gestures help speakers and listeners during communication and thinking. However, the beneficial effects of gestures exhibit variation across individuals and situations. This dissertation investigates how and to what extent listeners' attention to and processing of gestures show variation as a function of (1) individuals' cognitive dispositions, and (2) the semantic overlap between speech and gesture. In Chapter 2, I reviewed the current evidence on how individual differences in cognitive abilities relate to (1) gesture use: how frequently speakers use gestures and how and to what extent speakers benefit from using gestures during speaking and thinking and (2) gesture processing: how and to what extent listeners attend to, process, and benefit from observing gestures during comprehension and learning across different ages. This review provided a detailed assessment of the field's current state by taking a life-span perspective (starting from childhood through adulthood to healthy aging) and bridging fields of gesture production and gesture processing. I suggested that speakers might use gestures as a compensatory tool during speaking and thinking that interact with their cognitive dispositions. Chapter 2 revealed little research on the comprehension domain, and it is unknown how individual differences in different cognitive abilities relate to listeners' attention to and processing of gestures during language comprehension. Based on this, in Chapter 3, I investigated how individual differences in visual-spatial and verbal abilities related to the processing of concurrent spoken vs. gestural expressions in a mismatch paradigm (Kelly, Özyürek, & Maris, 2010). The results replicated earlier findings showing that speech and gesture bidirectionally affect each other during comprehension in a different language, Turkish. Moreover, I demonstrated that this is not a monolithic process and show variation across individuals. The results showed that listeners with higher visual-spatial abilities were better at processing gestures, whereas people with higher verbal abilities were better at processing speech. These findings suggest that visual-spatial cognitive resources are critical to process visual semantic information conveyed by gestures. Chapter 4 investigated how and to what extent the relative information value of gestures indexed by the semantic overlap between speech and gesture affected listeners' attention to gestures by employing the behavioral and eye-tracking methodology. In particular, I asked whether and how (1) listeners allocated overt visual attention to gestures that express complementary (e.g., saying here and gesturing to the right side) vs. redundant (e.g., saying right and gesturing to the right side) information to the accompanying speech and (2) individual differences in gazing at gestures related to how much listeners benefitted from seeing gestures during the comprehension of spatial relations between objects. I found that listeners fixated to gestures more when they complemented spoken deictic constructions (here) than when they expressed redundant information. Overt gaze attention to gestures did not predict how much information listeners gleaned from gestures. These results suggest that the perceived relative communicative value of gestures modulates listeners' attention to gestures; however, direct visual attention to gestures does not relate to information uptake from gestures as they can be processed peripherally. Overall, in this dissertation, I demonstrated that individual differences in visual-spatial cognitive resources and the relative communicative value of gestures across different contexts modulated listeners' attention to co-speech gestures. I contributed to the current literature by demonstrating that the so-called beneficial effects of gestures are not monolithic and show variation across individuals and situations. This dissertation demonstrated that gesture accounts and future research should consider different internal and external factors to have a full picture of when, why, and for whom gestures exhibit their supposed roles.