Speakers in dialogue have been shown to converge over time on the use of specific verbal expressions. This repeated use of expressions has been called lexical entrainment. A comparable phenomenon can be found in gesture. For example, interlocutors show a higher rate of similar gestures when they can see each other (Kimbara, 2006). Also, watching mimicked speech and gesture leads to higher production of mimicked speech and gesture (Parrill & Kimbara, 2006). We investigated whether gestural representations persist over time and are passed on from speaker to speaker. Participants watched one of five video clips in which a speaker describes a series of narrative events. Clips varied whether speakers used gestures and if so, what gesture form they used. Subsequently, participants had to relate those same events to an addressee. We analyzed whether participants produced gestures similar to the gestures the previous speaker had produced for narrating the same event. The results show that participants were more likely to produce a certain gesture form when they had seen the event described with that same gesture form, indicating gestural convergence. Implications for theories of gesture production and mechanisms of mimicry and entrainment are discussed.

Speakers make adjustments in response to their addressees’ perceived needs both in their speech and in their gestures. These adjustments are motivated by information about addressees’ needs established prior to the conversation or during the conversation. For instance, addressees’ feedback during the conversation can lead speakers to make adjustments in their narrations. When speakers interact with distracted addressees who give them little feedback, they narrate less vividly (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000) and gesture less frequently (Jacobs & Garnham, 2007). Speakers’ expectations, established prior to the conversation, about addressees’ level of engagement may motivate speakers to adjust their utterances accordingly. In this study, we consider how speakers’ expectations, in addition to addressees’ feedback, shape speakers’ narrations and also speakers’ gestures.  In 39 dyads (32 men and 46 women), speakers told addressees two jokes. Addressees were either attentive or else distracted by a second task, and speakers expected addressees to be either attentive or distracted. In two of the four experimental conditions, therefore, speakers held mistaken expectations about their addressees’ behavior. The results of this study are currently being interpreted.

A current debate concerns whether people integrate information from gestures with information from speech when forming memory representations. Related to this debate is whether extracting information from gestures affects the longevity of memory representations. This study addresses both how well people remember events whose description is accompanied by gesture and how well they remember these events over time. Participants watched videos of stories narrated by an actor and were later prompted to reproduce target events from each story. The stories were about two minutes long and included three target events, which differed in their congruency between speech and gesture for a particular action and were prompted after different lengths of delay. With respect to speech-gesture congruency, for each story, in one of the target events speech and gesture for a particular action were congruent with each other, in another target event speech and gesture were incongruent with each other, and in the remaining target event the action was encoded in speech but not in gesture. With respect to delay, for each story, one target event was prompted after a short delay (immediately after the story), another after an intermediate delay (after the next story), and the other after a long delay (after four stories). We compare how often participants realized the correct event and mentioned the correct verb for the target action, and how completely they reproduced the propositional content of the event, depending on speech-gesture congruency and delay. We also compare how often participants produced representational gestures for the target action and how often these gestures were congruent with the target verb. The data are currently being analyzed.