Beyond conveying objective content about objects and actions, what can co-speech iconic gestures reveal about a speaker’s subjective relationship to that content? The present study explores this question by investigating how gesture viewpoints can inform a listener’s construal of a speaker’s agency. Forty native English speakers watched videos of an actor uttering sentences with different viewpoints—that of low agency or high agency—conveyed through both speech and gesture. Participants were asked to (1) rate the speaker’s responsibility for the action described in each video (encoding task) and (2) complete a surprise memory test of the spoken sentences (recall task). For the encoding task, participants rated responsibility near ceiling when agency in speech was high, with a slight dip when accompanied by gestures of low agency. When agency in speech was low, responsibility ratings were raised markedly when accompanied by gestures of high agency. In the recall task, participants produced more incorrect recall of spoken agency when the viewpoints expressed through speech and gesture were inconsistent with one another. Our findings suggest that, beyond conveying objective content, co-speech iconic gestures can also guide listeners in gauging a speaker’s agentic relationship to actions and events.

除了传达关于物体和动作的客观内容之外，共同语音标志性手势还能揭示说话者与该内容的主观关系吗？本研究通过调查手势观点如何告知听众对演讲者能动性的解释来探讨这个问题。四十名以英语为母语的人观看了演员说出不同观点的句子的视频 - 低能动性或高能动性 - 通过言语和手势传达。参与者被要求（1）评价说话者对每个视频中描述的动作的责任（编码任务）和（2）完成口语句子的意外记忆测试（回忆任务）。对于编码任务，参与者在讲话中的能动性高时将责任评定为接近上限，而在伴随着低能动性的手势时会略有下降。当讲话中的能动性低时，伴随着高能动性的手势，责任等级会显着提高。在回忆任务中，当通过言语和手势表达的观点彼此不一致时，参与者对口头代理产生了更多的错误回忆。我们的研究结果表明，除了传达客观内容之外，共同讲话的标志性手势还可以指导听众衡量说话者与行动和事件的代理关系。