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that participants produce gestures which are more similar in terms
of handshape when they can see each other than when they cannot.
Parrill and Kimbara (2006), also working on experimental data, note
that observing mimicked gestures induces more mimicry in the
participants. They consider a gesture is repeated when two of the
following features are reproduced: motion, handshape or location.
Hand-gesture features are also central in Mol et al. (2012) who state
that imitators in laboratory speech are influenced in their mimicry by
features of the original gesture, for instance handedness. They show
as well that participants are influenced in their repetition of hand
gestures by the cognitive perspective adopted by the confederate
(like the description of items on a map from a vertical or a horizontal
viewpoint).
Instead of focusing on exact matches between the verbal and
gestural productions of participants to conversations in three languages,
Tabensky (2001) describes what she calls rephrasings , namely how
speakers mimic some semantic features while adding new features at
the same time. She is also concerned with temporal alignment of the
productions and what forms a language unit. From her corpus, she
observes that in some instances, the semantic features which formed
a package in speech and/or gesture in the original production are
separated into different units in the rephrasing (a process she terms
separation ), whereas in other instances, semantic features expressed in
several units in the original production are merged into a single unit
in the rephrasing (a process she terms fusion ).
At last, von Raffler-Engel (1986) observes full or partial gesture
imitation in transfers , namely the gestures made by an interpreter into
another language in consecutive translation. She describes gesture
repetition in terms of “repetition of parts to the whole” and determines
a series of components which must be proportional to the model for
a gesture to be considered as repeated but need not be identical:
muscular tension, gesture duration and movement extension, a series
of components that we also consider in the present study. Other gesture
characteristics have to be identical to the model to give an impression
of sameness. With this in mind, she notices that in many instances,
interpreters retake the gestures they observe in the speaker they
translate, instead of changing the original gestures in the re-packaging
of information involved in a translation. Yet, she mentions that the
gestures produced in the translation were judged natural enough by
native speakers of this language, so that no culturally inappropriate
gesture was copied into the translation.
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