Hand gestures while speaking influence how words are heard by others | Bob Yirka

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Jan. 28, 2021 (Phys.org) -- A team of researchers in The Netherlands has found that hand gestures used by people when speaking can influence how their words are being heard and interpreted by others.

In their paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University and TiCC Tilburg University describes experiments with volunteers who watched videos of people speaking with and without hand gestures.

Using hand gestures while speaking is common to politicians and people in television commercials -- but do such gestures have an impact on their audience? The researchers with this new effort sought to find the answer to that question by showing volunteers videos of people speaking under different conditions and then asking the volunteers questions about what they heard.

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