Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We aim at examining how communication mode influences the production of gestures under specific contextual environments. Twenty-four participants were asked to present a topic of their choice under three instructional settings: a blackboard, paper-and-pencil, and a tablet. Participants’ gestures were investigated in three groups: deictic gestures that point to entities, representational gestures that present picturable aspects of semantic content, and beat gestures that are speech-related rhythmic hand movements. The results indicated that gesture production of the participants was influenced by the mode of instruction (i.e., board, paper-and-pencil, tablet).