| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言學研究所 === 99 ===
Gestures are multi-functional devices accompanying speech, aiding in communication, tension reduction, conceptual planning, and lexical retrieval. This thesis only focuses on the role of gestures in lexical retrieval in Taiwan Mandarin. The idea of gestures helping lexical access derives from the observation that a speaker gestures even when he doesn’t see the listener. For example, a speaker still gestures when talking on the phone. Moreover, previous studies found that restricting hand movement increased the difficulty of lexical access, compared to when speakers were free to gesture.
Three experiments are used in the thesis. Experiment 1 is a picture description task to investigate the role of gestures in lexical access and spatial working memory. The results show that Participants used significantly more gestures when the pictures were absent than when the pictures were present. Participants also gestured significantly more when the pictures were namable than when the pictures were not namable. These two finings suggests that one purpose of gestures is to maintain spatial working memory.
Experiment 2 is a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) induced task. Participants had to name pictures inducing TOT states. The results show that Participants who were free to gesture named more target words than those who were not allowed to gesture, and more facilitation also occurred in resolving TOT states. Both findings supported the claim that gestures help lexical access. However, the findings also show that the most prevalent gesture type is self-adaptor which is not related to the content of speech. This finding leads to Experiment 3.
Experiment 3 investigated the possibility of whether tapping movements affect lexical access by using a TOT state task. The results show that Participants resolved more target words when they were tapping than when they kept their hands still on the keyboard, suggeting that iconicity is not necessary for gestures to aid lexical access.
To sum up, the present study shows that gestures can facilitate lexical retrieval in Taiwan Mandarin, including meaningless tapping movements. This finding suggests that the models of gesture production should be examined carefully by other experiments.
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