Embodied Experience Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture

The imagiscic component of language coexists with the linear segmented speech stream and suggests that the coordination of speech and gesture may provide fresh insight into the processes of speech and thou t.  

As the previous chapter suggests, miners learn to understand danger as instincts, hunches or feelings. Miners describe the ability to sense these physical phenomena as pit sense, an embodied sensory knowledge derived from site-specific practice in a particular working environment. When miners describe their experiences, their gestures convey the physical presence of this embodied sensory experience. 

Expert miners gesture more frequently on average than novice miners and use more gestures in which they use their entire bodies to portray a character in their narratives Gesture thus provides additional information about the spatial and temporal dimensions of risk—information not available in speech alone. The knowledge embodied in gesture may become invisible, however, if writers transcribe only the speech portion of oral testimony as evidence in scientific and te nical accounts of the disaster. 

These observations raised questions about the kinds of information individuals might represent in speech and gesture  

How might knowledge represented in speech and gesture reflect individuals situated experience in risky environments  

---

Embodied Experience Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture... 

---