Spontaneous Production of Figurative Language and Gesture in College Lectures

Abstract To evaluate relations between the spontaneous use of figurative language and nonverbal gestures, 3 college lectures by the same professor were videotaped and scored for the occurrence of both classes of events. Results indicated that figurative language and gestures frequently occurred in bursts; these bursts were defined by the centered moving average procedure often used in operations research to detect significant variations in the rate of an output process. Bursts of both novel figures and pictorial gestures were found to concern the central topic(s) of the lecture. Both types of bursts also were likely to occur when the lecture dealt with topics beyond the students' ordinary experience (e.g., what it is to be old) or presented a different understanding of a known topic (alcoholism is a game, not a disease). In some situations, both types of burst were found to overlap. When this occurred, the gesture served to augment the metaphor rather than to provide an alternative representation; in all cases, the gesture concerned the vehicle rather than the topic of the figure. Some largely deictic gestures as well as some largely cliched figures of speech were found to relate more to the flow of the lecture than to its content. Results of this study suggest that metaphors and gestures both singly and in combination serve 2 functions: (a) to orient audience members to the structure and flow of the lecture and (b) to present and emphasize novel perspectives on significant lecture content.