Why do people produce gesture?

Hi all,

In class I received an article about communication gesture with some interesting results about why human beings produce gesture.

First, a gesture is a movement with the hands produced by people, some people state a gesture involves a movement of the whole body. There are all different types of gestures such as, gestures used in deaf sign language or a nervous scratch. This blog is about communication gestures.

When people are communicating face to face they move their body continuously. All movements of the body, from crossing the legs to playing with an object while communication, belongs to communication gestures.

Just like (most likely) most of you do, I gesture all the time. However, I’m not sure why I do that. Do you know why you gesture?

There exist two theories about why people gesture, the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH) and the Information Packing Hypothesis (IPH). Scholars that support the LRH theory state that people gesture to help listeners to understand what the speaker is saying. Alternatively, the IPH theory argues that gesture and speech help to constitute thought and that gestures reflect the mental representation that is activated at the moment of speaking.

It looks like that helping listeners to better understand a conversation is not the main function of gesture, scholars have laid evidence that blind speakers spontaneously gesture, even when they speak to blind listeners.

What do you think? Why do you gesture while speaking, to help the listener or to help yourself by organizing your thoughts? It would be interesting if you share your thoughts in a comment.