Educación ambiental: confusiones y sesgos

Since this experiment was mainly focused on the representationality of the gestures and their role when the subjects increase their communicative effort, the different types of gestures were divided into three main categories (representational, discursive and emblems). During the annotation phase of this investigation, the gestures, as said before, were assigned to one of the three macro-categories. It is important, though, to mention that each subject typically have their own gesticulation style and that this changed according to their personality traits, sense of confidence and feelings. The three different corpora (Italian t1, English t1, English t2) that were

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analyzed for this experiment include three different times in which each speaker told the story. As for the representational macro-category, in each experimental condition there had been a few representational gestures that happened to occur more often than others. This occurred mainly with those gestures that matched with those that were perceived by the subjects as the most salient points of the fable, these can be summarized in the following list (for the whole fable, see Appendix 1):

a) the crow was flying around b) it picks up the piece of cheese c) the window sill

d) it went on the top of the tree e) a fox arrived

f) the fox saw the cheese (and asked the crow to sing) g) the crow opened it beak

h) the cheese fell down

i) the fox caught the cheese (and walked away)

In general, the subjects did not show significant changes their gesturing style from the first to the second narration in English and neither they presented any particular different style when speaking their native language. A difference that was perceived, though, was the fact that in their second narration the gestures they used seemed to be slightly wider (with a possible use of a greater gesture space) and with more precise movements. This could be explained with the gain of confidence and greater memorization of the tale, features that can have caused a lighter cognitive load and less nervousness in front of the camera.

The first within the most common representational gestures made by the subjects is a) the crow was flying around.

As in the example (fig. 11), in her performances in English, Student C produced a co-speech gesture while she was speaking about the crow flying while looking for food. In her first attempt, while saying “[the crow] flew around5 looking…”, the speaker used a very rapid movement from the upper left periphery to the center of the gesture space, she kept the hand open conveying the

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meaning of the crow gliding down to reach the food. In her second attempt, the second repetition,

the subject uses a different type of gesture to convey the same sense. In fact, even if the co- occurring speech does not change much from the first time she told the story (this time she said “flying around looking for food”), her gesture seems to be wider and longer: the subjects rises her hand in the upper left space while her hand draws some circles in the air for a couple of times. Another example of representational gesturing style is the one reported in fig. 12. One of the salient points of the story was the fact that after spotting it, the crow picks a piece of cheese in its beak. A clear example of the gesture that the subjects performed is the one showed below:

English 1 English 2 Italian

In this example, it is possible to notice one only difference in the gesturing style of this speaker. In fact, she actually seems to perform the exact same gesture in both her first telling in English

Fig. 11 Student C in her first (on the left) and second telling of the fable in English

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and her telling in Italian: with her left hand in the center-center gesture space, she mimics the beak of the bird while grabbing something small (the cheese). In her second performance in English, though, her gesturing style changes: she does not use the left hand anymore, but rather prefers to use her right hand and to use a completely different gesture space: this time she uses a wider movement that goes from the upper right space, down to the lower right space of gesturing. This kind of changes in the gesturing style from the first and the second performances in English happened in other occasions, with other gestures and other participants too. These results might let room for speculations about the way speaker perceive their communicative style. Since the gesturing style did not change much within the first time they told the story in English and Italian in which the subjects were only asked to repeat the story, what could have made them change their actual representational gesturing style might have been the communicative instruction that was given to them before performing their second task in English.

For what concerns those gestures that were annotated as part of the discursive category, the gestures that more often happened to occur were those that rhythmically accompanied the telling of the fable and the cyclic and vague gestures that often occurred together with hesitancies, disfluencies and approximations:

Sp.F- English 1 Sp.E - English 2 Sp.B - Italian

Beat gestures (in fig.13), are those repeated movements without stroke phase that typically accompany the rhythm of speech (McNeill, 1992, 2005). In this investigation, these kind of gestures were considered and annotated as part of the discursive macro-category. In the examples in fig. 13 were reported a few of these gestures.

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In the first image in fig. 13, speaker F is performing a beat gesture right after a hesitation. The co-occurring speech in fact is: “it is [disfluency] an animal” where the beat gesture underlines the word animal. Instead, in the second picture, speaker E is marking every single word in the phrase “so he starts singing” by hitting her left hand on the right one, more precisely on the tips of her right fingers. In the third picture, student B is tracing an oblique line up and down on the bottom part of her gesture space while she pronounces the words “la volpe inizia a lusingarlo” (translated: the fox starts to flatter him). Her hands, in this case, underline the word lusingarlo. Other examples of gestures that were annotated as part of the discursive category are the cyclic (Ladewig, 2011) and the vagueness and approximation gestures (Vincze & Poggi, 2013).

Sp. E - English 1 Sp. D -English 1

The two examples reported above (fig. 14) are taken from the performances of two students that were both engaged in their first attempts in English. Similar gestures occurred also in the second repetition in English and in the attempt in Italian, though, they happened more frequently in English (at time 1). In the first picture, Student E is performing a cyclic gesture in the center- center area of her gesture space while saying “because she is a [pause] clever animal”. By producing such a gesture Student E conveys an approximation, as if she was not completely satisfied with the word she chose but that probably that word is the one that gets closer to the meaning she wants to convey. The picture on the right of fig. 14, instead, shows a gesture that is characterized by more complex movements. In fact, the hands of Student D are both engaged in two different actions: with her right hand she produces some small irregular movements from the center-center space to the lower right periphery of her gesture space, meanwhile she performs a sort of a beat movement with her left hand which she keeps open and rigid, while making a very

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little movement from the center to the left. In this case, Speaker D was very nervous and shy while she was pronouncing the phrase “fly down to [pause] catch the cheese” so probably her cognitive load was very high and she produced the gesture of vagueness as a sort of lexical retrieval tool. In summary, all these kind of gestures often carry a clear pragmatic or meta- narrative meaning but were considered part of the discursive category because they did not carry any representational feature linked to the object of the discourse.

The last distinction that was made in order to annotate the gesture occurrences of this experiments is the one dedicated to emblem gestures. The present task was not designed to elicit this kind of gestures but, since they are highly cultural, they could appear anyway. An emblem that often occurred, for instance, is the Italian emblem that means “yesterday” or “time ago”, it is performed folding the arm and rotating the hand as if throwing something behind the shoulder (Caon, 2010). This kind of gesture was performed by the speakers both when speaking Italian and English, at the beginning of the story, while saying sentences as “once upon a time”.

As shown in fig. 15, the emblem gesture that was used the most by all the subjects was the one co-occurring with the phrase “once upon a time there was a crow”. It actually occurred in every condition, but it occurred the most in the English t2 condition when subjects were asked to perform a more communicative narration. The use of emblems was not statistically significant and this experiment was not designed to elicit this gesture category. Yet, these results give an input to a further investigation about the use of emblems in story-telling.

Sp. B English 2 Sp. F English 2

Fig. 15 Emblem occurrence. In this case, both Student B and F are performing the same emblem "once upon a time"

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