Systematicity and Idiosyncrasy in Iconic Gestures—A Probabilistic Model of Gesture Use

Introduction Current literature on gesture research states that the question “why different gestures take the particular physical form they do is one of the most important yet largely unaddressed questions in gesture research” [1, p. 499]. This holds especially for iconic gestures, for which information has to be mapped from some mental image into (at least partly) resembling gestural form. This transformation is neither direct nor straightforward but involves a number of issues like the composability of a suitable linguistic context, the choice of gestural representation technique (e.g., placing, drawing etc.), or the low-level choices of morphological features such as handshape or movement trajectory. Current research does not offer much concrete findings, that could inform the meaning-form mapping. We present an empirical study to elucidate some of these puzzles and a probabilistic model to simulate human gesture production.