The Meaning of Metaphorical Gestures

In gesturing metaphorically, people use physical space to represent abstract ideas that have no spatial instantiation in the world (e.g., gesturing upward to indicate high intelligence). This volume illustrates the range of metaphorical gestures that people produce, yet researchers have only just begun to explore the psychological significance of these gestures. What functions might they serve in the mind of the gesturer? Do metaphorical gestures serve the same cognitive or communicative functions as concrete gestures? What do metaphorical gestures mean for theories of how people mentally represent abstract concepts? In this chapter, we describe a series of experiments in which concrete and abstract gestures (Müller, 1998) were either elicited or inhibited, to elucidate relationships between mental representations of physical space and mental representations of abstract conceptual domains that are typically described using spatial metaphors (e.g., value, rank, time). Results showed that speakers’ spontaneous gestures were overwhelmingly consistent with the spatial schemas implied by their utterances, regardless of whether space was used literally (e.g., the rocket went up) or metaphorically (e.g., my grades went up). This was true even when abstract concepts were described without using any spatial language (e.g., my grades got better). Participants who were prevented from gesturing produced more verbal disfluencies when describing literal and metaphorical spatial concepts than those who were allowed to gesture freely. Further experiments manipulating the visibility of the gesturer and recipient showed that gestures corresponding to literal spatial concepts appear to be designed for the listener, but gestures corresponding to metaphorically spatialized concepts may principally serve internal cognitive functions for the speaker. Findings suggest that people ‘recycle’ some of the mental representations used for reasoning about physical motion and space in order to instantiate abstract concepts.