Turn-timing and the body: Gesture speeds up conversation
Conversation is the core niche of human multi-modal language use and it is characterized by a system of taking
turns. This organization poses a particular psycholinguistic challenge for its participants: considering the gap
between two speaking turns averages around just 200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009) but the production of single
word utterances takes a minimum of 600 ms alone (Indefrey & Levelt, 2004), language production and
comprehension must largely run in parallel; while listening to an on-going turn, a next speaker has to predict
the upcoming content and end of that turn to start preparing their own and launch it on time (Levinson, 2013).
Recently, research has begun to investigate the cognitive processes underpinning turn-taking (see Holler et al.,
2015 for an overview), but this research has focused on the spoken modality. The present study investigates the
role co-speech gestures may play in this process. We analysed a corpus of 7 casual face-to-face conversations
between English speakers for all question-response sequences (N=281), the gestures that accompanied the
identified set of questions, and the timing of these gestures with respect to the speaking turns they
accompanied. Moreover, we measured the length of all inter-turn gaps in our set. Our main research question
was whether the length of the gap between turns varied systematically as a consequence of questions being
accompanied by gesture. Our results revealed that this is indeed the case: Questions with a gestural component
were responded to significantly faster than questions without a gestural component. This finding holds when we
consider head and hand gestures separately, when we control for points of possible completion in the verbal
utterance prior to turn end, and when we control for complexity associated with question type. Furthermore,
our findings revealed that within the group of questions accompanied by gestures, those questions whose
gestures retracted prior to turn end were responded to faster than questions whose gestures retracted
following turn end. This study provides evidence that gestures accompanying spoken questions in conversation
facilitate the coordination of turns. While experimental studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of gestures
on language processing, this is the first evidence that gestures may benefit processing even in the rich,
cognitively challenging context of conversational interaction. That is, gestures appear to play an important
psycholinguistic function during immersed, in situ language processing. Experimental work is currently
exploring at which level (semantic, pragmatic, perceptual) the facilitative effects we found are operating. The
findings not only suggest psycholinguistic processing benefits but also expand on previous turn-taking models
that restrict the function of gesture to turn-yielding/-keeping cues (Duncan, 1972) as well as on turn-taking
models focusing primarily on the verbal modality (Sacks et al., 1974).
Publication type
TalkPublication date
2016
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