Do speakers design their cospeech gestures for their addressees?: The effects of addressee location on representational gestures

Do speakers use spontaneous gestures accompanying, their specch for themselves or to communicate their message their addressees? Two experiments show that speakers change the orientation of their gestures depending on the location of shared space, that is the intersection of the gesture spaces of the speakers and addressees. Gesture orientations change more frequently when the accompany spatial prepositions such is into and out, which describe motion that has a beginning and end point, rather than across, which depicts an unbounded path across space. Speakers change their gestures so that they represent the beginning and end point of motion INTO or OUT by moving into or out of the shared space, Thus speakers design their gestures for their addressees and therefore use them to communicate, This has implication, for the view that gestures are a part of language use as well as for the role of gestures in speech production. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).