Gesture Production and Theory of Mind: Effective Disambiguation in Communication through Gesture

People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind, accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is this ability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, or does it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whether adults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevant information, representing different features of the target in different contexts. In a two-item reference game, adults gestured to a partner to indicate which object was the target. Item pairs differed in one of three features (size, shape, pattern). We found that adults were more likely to gesture a feature when it was relevant to distinguishing the two possible referents, versus when it was not. Thus, adults flexibly modified their gestures to meet their partners’ needs, emphasizing the relevant feature. These data lay a foundation for future work on the development of use of theory of mind in gestural communication in childhood.