More Empathetic Hearing Speakers Create More Communicatively Effective Gestural Symbols in a Rudimentary Communication System

Communication begins with an individual's creation of communicative signs to convey concepts, but the precise process by which individuals create signs to represent concepts remains unclear. Silent gestures offer a window into this process. When spoken language is unavailable, individuals resort to the manual modality, creating gestural signs to represent concepts. Despite having multiple options for creating gestural signs to refer to the same concept, hearing speakers consistently create identical gestures for certain concepts. The interesting question is how individuals choose a gestural sign when several are available to them. In this study, we propose that individuals select gesture signs that are efficient for comprehension. They estimate the communicative efficacy (i.e., the likelihood of being understood by a potential interpreter) of their gestures and choose the most efficient ones. We explore the role of an individual’s empathy level in this process. Our findings support our hypothesis; the gestural signs produced by the majority of participants were those that facilitate comprehension. We also established a connection between estimated communicative efficacy and an individual’s empathy level. More empathetic participants provided more accurate estimations of gestures’ communicative efficacy and were more likely to produce gestures with higher communicative efficacy (e.g., the most frequent gestures) compared to less empathetic participants.