Filled
Pauses and Gestures: It's Not Coincidence
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Nicholas
Christenfeld, Stanley Schachter, and Frances Bilous
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| Abstract |
| Though filled pauses and gestures
frequently accompany speech, their function is not well understood. We suggest that
it may be helpful in furthering our knowledge of these phenomena to examine their
relationship to each other. To this end, we carried out two studies examining
whether they tend to occur together, or to occur at separate times. Both faculty
colloquium speakers and undergraduate subjects used filled pauses less frequently when
they were gesturing than when they were not gesturing. This effect held for 30 out
of 31 subjects. We suggest that detailed theories may be premature, but speculate
that gestures may be an indication that the speech production appartus has completed its
search for the next word, phrase or idea and is ready to continue. |
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| Christenfeld,
N., S. Schachter, & F. Bilous 1991 Filled Pauses and Gestures: It's Not
Coincidence. In Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 20/1: 1-20. |
