The addressee’s face as a cue for gesture production

Speakers produce more gestures when an addressee can see the speaker than when the addressee cannot. This visibility effect may arise because the speaker produces more gestures when gestures can convey information to the addressee, but it is unclear whether the visibility of gesture is crucial. We investigated whether speakers produce more gestures because the addressee can see the speaker’s gestures, or because the speaker can see the addressee’s face. We found that speakers produced more gestures when they could see the addressee’s face than when they could not, but only when describing dynamic spatial stimuli (Experiment 2), not when discussing abstract contents (Experiment 1). There was no evidence that speakers produced more gestures when the addressee could see the gestures than when the addressee could not (Experiment 3). Thus, the addressee’s face triggers gesture production when discussing spatial stimuli for which gestures are especially communicatively useful.