Collaborative idea construction: Repetition of gestures and talk in joint brainstorming

This study examines the roles of gesture repetition in the process of collaboratively shaping ideas. The data involve three college students brainstorming for the production of a short film. Employing primarily language and depictive gestures, the participants collaboratively shape ideas of the film scenes, characters’ actions, and camerawork; they accept or reject each other’s proposals, elaborate upon them, modify a part of them, and/or combine them into complex wholes. In particular, by repeating one another’s gestures (or components thereof), the participants can show their manipulation of one another’s ideas. On the one hand, the analyses demonstrate that the participants can indicate full acceptance of the previous speaker’s idea, a cooperative move, by fully repeating the gesture produced during its proposal. On the other hand, a partial or modified repeat of the previous gesture does not signal complete acceptance of the previous proposal: the repeated feature of the gesture represents an accepted part of the previous proposal, but the modified feature of the gesture reveals exactly what the speaker does not accept and suggests instead. The present study thus demonstrates how repetition or modification of gestures across speakers serves to create coherence and to display cooperation and competition. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.