This dissertation is an examination of gesture in two game nights: one in spoken English between four hearing friends and another in American Sign Language between four Deaf friends. Analyses of gesture have shown there exists a complex integration of manual gestures with speech. Analyses of sign language have implicated the body as a medium capable of rendering symbolically complex structures that wax and wane linguistic. By incorporating a Peircean semiotic analysis of symbols (including spoken and sign language) in the tradition of interactional sociolinguistics, I analyze both spoken and sign discourses as situated engagements that effect and are affected by the embodied, composite utterances (Enfield 2009) contained within them. To address simplified conceptualizations of gesture as a continuum of forms, I compare embodied utterances in an array of interactive environments, showing the flexibility and constraints of the gestural modality. When participants played the game, gesture took on full burden of communication and both hearing and deaf players continued to use their bodies in similar ways to structure the utterances as part of a discourse (cf. Bavelas 1994). When

the learner

Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children un-derstood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine be-havior that Piaget overlooked – the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These ges-tures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the speaker has about the problem, often ideas that are not found in that spea-ker’s talk. But gesture can do more than reflect ideas – it can also change them. In this sense, gesture behaves like any other action; both gesture and action on objects facilitate learning problems on which training was given. However, only gesture promotes trans-ferring the knowledge gained to problems that require generalization. Gesture is, in fact, a special kind of action in that it represents the world rather than directly manipulating the world (gesture does not move objects around). The mechanisms by which gesture and action promote learning may therefore differ – gesture is able to high-light components of an action that promote abstract learning while leaving out details that could tie learning to a specific context. Because it is both an action and a representation, gesture can serve as a bridge between the two and thus be a powerful tool for learn-ing abstract ideas.

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Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children un-derstood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine be-havior that Piaget overlooked – the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These ges-tures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the speaker has about the problem, often ideas that are not found in that spea-ker’s talk. But gesture can do more than reflect ideas – it can also change them. In this sense, gesture behaves like any other action; both gesture and action on objects facilitate learning problems on which training was given. However, only gesture promotes trans-ferring the knowledge gained to problems that require generalization. Gesture is, in fact, a special kind of action in that it represents the world rather than directly manipulating the world (gesture does not move objects around). The mechanisms by which gesture and action promote learning may therefore differ – gesture is able to high-light components of an action that promote abstract learning while leaving out details that could tie learning to a specific context. Because it is both an action and a representation, gesture can serve as a bridge between the two and thus be a powerful tool for learn-ing abstract ideas.