Gunter Thomas C, Weinbrenner J E Douglas, Holle Henning
Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Hull Hull, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Feb 9;6:80. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00080. eCollection 2015.
Pointing toward concrete objects is a well-known and efficient communicative strategy. Much less is known about the communicative effectiveness of abstract pointing where the pointing gestures are directed to "empty space." McNeill's (2003) observations suggest that abstract pointing can be used to establish referents in gesture space, without the referents being physically present. Recently, however, it has been shown that abstract pointing typically provides redundant information to the uttered speech thereby suggesting a very limited communicative value (So et al., 2009). In a first approach to tackle this issue we were interested to know whether perceivers are sensitive at all to this gesture cue or whether it is completely discarded as irrelevant add-on information. Sensitivity to for instance a gesture-speech mismatch would suggest a potential communicative function of abstract pointing. Therefore, we devised a mismatch paradigm in which participants watched a video where a female was interviewed on various topics. During her responses, she established two concepts in space using abstract pointing (e.g., pointing to the left when saying Donald, and pointing to the right when saying Mickey). In the last response to each topic, the pointing gesture accompanying a target word (e.g., Donald) was either consistent or inconsistent with the previously established location. Event related brain potentials showed an increased N400 and P600 when gesture and speech referred to different referents, indicating that inconsistent use of gesture space impairs language comprehension. Abstract pointing was found to influence comprehension even though gesture was not crucial to understanding the sentences or conducting the experimental task. These data suggest that a referent was retrieved via abstract pointing and that abstract pointing can potentially be used for referent indication in a discourse. We conclude that abstract pointing has a potential communicative function.
指向具体物体是一种广为人知且有效的交流策略。对于指向“空空间”的抽象指向的交流效果，人们了解得要少得多。麦克尼尔（2003年）的观察表明，抽象指向可用于在手势空间中确立指称对象，即便这些指称对象并非实际存在。然而，最近有研究表明，抽象指向通常会为说出的话语提供冗余信息，从而表明其交流价值非常有限（苏等人，2009年）。在解决这个问题的首次尝试中，我们想知道感知者是否对手势线索敏感，或者它是否会被完全当作无关的附加信息而被摒弃。例如，对手势与言语不匹配的敏感性将暗示抽象指向具有潜在的交流功能。因此，我们设计了一种不匹配范式，让参与者观看一段视频，视频中一名女性就各种话题接受采访。在她回答问题时，她通过抽象指向在空间中确立了两个概念（例如，说“唐纳德”时指向左边，说“米老鼠”时指向右边）。在对每个话题的最后回答中，伴随目标词（如“唐纳德”）的指向手势要么与先前确立的位置一致，要么不一致。事件相关脑电位显示，当手势和言语指称不同的指称对象时，N400和P600会增强，这表明手势空间的不一致使用会损害语言理解。研究发现，尽管手势对于理解句子或完成实验任务并非至关重要，但抽象指向仍会影响理解。这些数据表明，通过抽象指向检索到了一个指称对象，并且抽象指向在话语中可能被用于指称指示。我们得出结论，抽象指向具有潜在的交流功能。
