Effects of encouraging the use of gestures on speech

What is it about?

Humans speak and produce hand gestures. The underlying mechanisms and functions of this interaction are still a key question. In an empirical study, 20 speakers told short narratives to a listener. Speakers were encouraged to make gestures while speaking. The speech of the target narratives was assessed with a set of phonetic, prosodic and textual features. Specifically, by analyzing speech discourse length (number of words and discourse length in seconds), disfluencies (filled pauses, self-corrections, repetitions, insertions, interruptions), speech rate and acoustic properties (measures of F0, and intensity). The results show that asking speakers to use their hands while describing a story can have an effect on narration length, and can also impact on speech F0 and intensity metrics.

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Why is it important?

Our findings suggest that, in the speech production process, enhancing the gesture stream by encouraging speakers to gesture can affect speech length and acoustics, providing further evidence that the two modalities are planned and produced in combination.