The research team, led by Songlei Zhang and Hua Chen, adapted an established silent gesture paradigm to elicit productions from 38 Mandarin-speaking hearing adults with no knowledge of Chinese Sign Language or any other signed system. Participants were undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students at Nanjing University, all right-handed, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no motor conditions that would interfere with hand movements. Each participant sat in front of a 13-inch laptop while a high-definition camera recorded their gesture productions at 60 frames per second. They saw Chinese words one at a time on the screen and had exactly four seconds to communicate each meaning using silent gestures only. They were told that their gestures would later be shown to other people who would try to guess the intended meanings, and that there were no correct or incorrect ways to express a concept. The complete session, including instructions, practice trials, the formal task, and breaks, lasted approximately 30 minutes.

The stimulus set consisted of 246 concepts presented as Chinese lexical items, spanning 162 concrete and 84 abstract concepts across 12 conceptual categories. The researchers compiled an initial pool of 500 high-frequency Chinese words from SUBTLEX-CH, a database of word and character frequencies based on film and television subtitles, excluding function words, highly polysemous items, and strongly context-dependent items. An independent group of 26 undergraduate students rated the concreteness of the candidate items on a 7-point scale, showing good internal consistency with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.84. Items with a mean rating of 3 or lower were classified as abstract, while those with a mean rating of 5 or higher were classified as concrete. The retained items were then assigned to six concrete categories, including actions with objects, actions without objects, manipulable objects, non-manipulable objects, animate entities, and social role entities, and six abstract categories, including emotions, social concepts, cognition, human actions, attributes, and magnitude-related concepts. Inter-coder agreement for category assignment was near perfect, with a Fleiss’s kappa of 0.96.

The coding proceeded in three steps using ELAN software. The researchers first identified meaningful gesture units, defined as the smallest manually articulated components that contributed identifiable semantic content to a response. They then assigned each unit one of 11 iconic strategies grouped under five broader iconicity types: action-based, form-based, relation-based, convention-based, and schema-based. Action-based iconicity included acting, where the hands simulate a specific manual action or object-directed manipulation, and enacting, where the hands participate in the reenactment of a broader activity or emotional experience. Form-based iconicity included drawing, where the hand traces an outline in the air; embodying, where the hands take on the form of the referent; representing, where the hand functions as a proxy for an entity; and personification, where the gesturer’s body is mapped onto the body of a non-human referent. Relation-based iconicity included pointing, locating, and path mapping. The researchers also introduced two additional strategies: symbolic mapping, which captures culturally recognizable manual forms whose conventional meaning retains an identifiable iconic or metaphorical motivation, such as a thumbs-up gesture, and schema mapping, which represents target concepts through schematic spatial or dynamic patterns such as containment, balance, scale, or recurrence.

Of the 7,584 silent gesture responses containing at least one meaningful manual unit, 1,939 were combinatorial, meaning they contained more than one meaningful gesture unit. Sequential-only combinations accounted for 1,242 responses, simultaneous-only combinations for 585 responses, and mixed combinations for 112 responses. The remaining 5,645 responses were non-combinatorial, containing only a single meaningful unit. The researchers found that concrete concepts were more likely than abstract concepts to elicit combinations overall, with an odds ratio of 1.80, and were particularly more likely to elicit simultaneous-only combinations, with an odds ratio of 3.94. Conceptual category was associated with all three organizational formats. Manipulable objects and non-manipulable objects showed the highest estimated probabilities for combinatorial responses, while emotions, actions without objects, and animate entities showed the lowest.

For simultaneous combinations, the researchers extracted 708 valid bimanual pairings from 696 responses, yielding 1,416 meaningful gesture units. They found that action-based gesture units occurred predominantly in the focal hand, with 322 focal-hand units compared to only 9 anchoring-hand units, whereas relation-based units were concentrated in the anchoring hand, with 46 focal-hand units compared to 325 anchoring-hand units. Form-based units occurred frequently in both hands. The two most common pairings at the level of iconicity type were an action-based unit in the focal hand with a form-based unit in the anchoring hand, accounting for 41.67 percent of pairings, and a form-based unit in the focal hand with a relation-based unit in the anchoring hand, accounting for 38.14 percent. At the level of individual strategies, the most frequent pairing was acting in the focal hand and embodying in the anchoring hand, followed by representing and locating. These bimanual pairing patterns varied across conceptual categories, with actions with objects and manipulable objects showing the strongest preference for action-based and form-based pairings, while actions without objects, animate entities, and non-manipulable objects showed a strong preference for form-based and relation-based pairings.

For sequential combinations, the researchers analyzed 1,343 responses containing a sequential component, yielding 2,790 gesture units and 1,447 adjacent transitions. Most sequential responses were short, with 92.41 percent containing only two units. The researchers found that iconic strategies differed systematically between initial and final positions. Drawing occurred in initial position in 82.25 percent of its occurrences, and embodying occurred initially in 71.74 percent of its occurrences. The opposite pattern was observed for acting, path mapping, and symbolic mapping, which occurred predominantly in final position. When temporal order was taken into account, the most frequent transition was drawing to acting, followed by embodying to acting. Of the 26 recurrent pairs examined for directionality, 14 showed a statistically supported preferred temporal order after Benjamini-Hochberg correction. Drawing preceded acting in 85.38 percent of transitions involving the two strategies, and embodying preceded acting in 91.94 percent. Similarly, pointing preceded symbolic mapping in 87.01 percent of transitions, and schema mapping preceded symbolic mapping in 90.91 percent.

Mixed combinations, which contained both sequential and simultaneous organization, were infrequent but clustered in concepts that invited both temporal staging and bimanual integration. They were most numerous for manipulable objects, followed by cognition concepts and non-manipulable objects. A small number of concepts accounted for a disproportionate share of mixed responses, with contrast eliciting 12 instances, shoes eliciting 10 instances, and nail eliciting 9 instances. For nail, a recurrent pattern began with one hand embodying the nail by holding the index finger upright while the other hand pointed to it, followed by the embodying hand remaining in place while the other hand changed to an acting movement depicting hammering. This response consisted of two successive simultaneous pairings, pointing and embodying followed by acting and embodying. For contrast, the most frequent pattern was representing followed by representing and locating, in which an initial gesture established a comparative frame and a simultaneous combination integrated relational information with spatial anchoring.

The researchers argue that these findings extend patterned iconicity beyond the selection of individual form-meaning mappings to the relations among multiple iconic depictions. The predominance of sequential combinations is particularly informative, given that the manual-visual modality also allows distinct meaning components to be expressed simultaneously across the two hands. One possible explanation concerns the demands of coordinating distinct depictions across the hands, as their handshapes, movements, and relative positions must jointly reflect the intended relation between the represented components. Producing units successively allows participants to reshape and reposition their hands for each depiction, which may have favored sequential combinations when several iconic strategies were used to express an individual concept. Where one hand could maintain a representation of an object while the other enacted its use, a simultaneous pairing could also be incorporated into the unfolding sequence, as observed in the mixed combinations for nail and shoe.

The study also reveals informative contrasts within the abstract domain. Attributes, social concepts, and cognition concepts were among the abstract categories most strongly associated with sequential-only combinations, while simultaneous-only combinations were uncommon. For attributes, a carrier, scale, or reference point may provide a basis for depicting the relevant property. Similarly, a social concept may be depicted through participants and their relation within an interaction frame. For cognition concepts, spatial locations, image schemas, comparisons, and relational mappings may likewise provide resources for manual representation. In all these cases, sequential organization allows separate externalization of different representational dimensions across successive gesture units. At the other end of the distribution, emotions, actions without objects, and animate entities showed comparatively low rates of combination. Emotion concepts can draw on facial expression and bodily stance, so part of their communicative force may lie outside the manual units analyzed here. Actions without objects can often be enacted directly because there is no separate affected object that needs to be represented. Animate entities often invite personification, allowing the body to stand for the referent without further decomposition. These differences help explain why the analysis of conceptual categories revealed variation in combinations beyond that captured by the broad distinction between concrete and abstract concepts, demonstrating that the organized use of partial depictions extends to meanings without stable visible referents.

Subject of Research: Combinatorial structure of iconic strategies in the manual-visual modality: evidence from silent gestures by hearing non-signers

Article Title: Combinatorial structure of iconic strategies in the manual-visual modality: evidence from silent gestures by hearing non-signers

Article References: Zhang, S., & Chen, H. (2026). Combinatorial structure of iconic strategies in the manual-visual modality: evidence from silent gestures by hearing non-signers. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1917740. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1917740

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1917740

Keywords: silent gesture, iconicity, manual-visual modality, combinatorial structure, hearing non-signers, gesture research, cognitive science, language evolution, bimanual pairing, sequential organization, conceptual category, concreteness