Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind,accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is thisability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, ordoes it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whetheradults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevantinformation, representing different features of the target indifferent contexts. In a two-item reference game, adultsgestured to a partner to indicate which object was the target.Item pairs differed in one of three features (size, shape,pattern). We found that adults were more likely to gesture afeature when it was relevant to distinguishing the two possiblereferents, versus when it was not. Thus, adults flexiblymodified their gestures to meet their partners’ needs,emphasizing the relevant feature. These data lay a foundationfor future work on the development of use of theory of mind ingestural communication in childhood.