Not so dependent after all: functional perception of speakers’ gestures with and without speech

Speakers’ spontaneous gestures are traditionally thought of as a dependent system, their meaning relying heavily on what is expressed verbally. Nonetheless, studies using muted videos as stimuli consistently report that gestures have some degree of communicative import in the absence of speech. Here, we argue that the dependence-autonomy question can be advanced by adopting a functional (linguistic) perspective. We ask whether access to speech is necessary to understand what kind of semantic or pragmatic function a gesture performs. Based on a large-scale web-based perception study, we report that when the notion of meaning is operationalized on a functional level, the dependence of gesture on speech largely diminishes.