Offering a hand to pragmatic understanding: The role of speech and gesturein comprehension and memory

Most theories of pragmatics take as the basic unit of communication the ver bal content of spoken or written utterances. However, many of these theorie s have overlooked the fact that important information about an utterance's meaning can be conveyed nonverbally. In the present study, we investigate t he pragmatic role that hand gestures play in language comprehension and mem ory. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that people were more likely to inter pret an utterance as an indirect request when speech was accompanied by a r elevant pointing gesture than when speech or gesture was presented alone. F ollowing up on this, Experiment 3 supported the idea that speech and gestur e mutually disambiguate the meanings of one another. Finally, Experiment 4 generalized the findings to different types of speech acts (recollection of events) with a different type of gesture (iconic gestures). The results fr om these experiments suggest that broader units of analysis beyond the verb al message may be needed in studying pragmatic understanding. (C) 1999 Acad emic Press.