Hand Gestures

Congruent gesture, also known as co-speech gesture, involves either verbal or non-verbal communication with hand and body movements at a very deep semantic level. According to McNeill (1992), iconic gestures are natural and prevalent aspects of spoken language which are not arbitrary. At the same time, it brings across informations that visually refer to the concept that it suppose to convey. These gestures can be iconic, like drinking water requires the speaker to raise his thumb to his lips with the pinky out and tilting the head backwards. When speaking, one will unconsciously make prominent gestures, which gets registered into the listener’s head; learnt and remembered with the linked gesture. These iconic gestures are useful inputs to learners of a second language during comprehension and learning (Kelly et. al, 2009). We can see that congruent gestures are associated with meaning of the speech. The association produces stronger and more multimodal memory representations as it incorporates the use of gestures and also speech.

Lip Reading

Other than that, lip reading is also classified under congruent speech, and is one out of the many aspects of speech. Lip reading and hand gestures would be applicable when differentiating the length of syllables and vowels. The beats made by the hands and the movement of lips can be put together to make out the length of the particular syllable. When the speaker is trying to recall back the word, the impact of the hand gestures somehow makes the semantic recalling process easier and faster, besides ensuring the word pronunciation is accurate. This multimodal information combined with speech helps listeners to comprehend language better(Clark, 1996; Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill,1992).