Journal
LANGUAGE LEARNING
Volume 70, Issue 1, Pages 266-304Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/lang.12376
Keywords
gesture; speech production; gesture-speech alignment; temporal patterns; monolinguals; bilinguals
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Funding
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
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When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether bilinguals, known to experience a higher degree of competition in lexical access, show a different pattern of gesture-speech alignment compared to that of monolinguals. Results revealed no difference in the temporal patterns between gestures and co-semantic speech for the two language groups. Synchronous gestures were significantly more frequent than asynchronous ones; asynchronous gestures both preceded and followed the correlated speech, yet preceding gestures tended to occur more often. A qualitative analysis conducted for asynchronous gestures revealed that they may serve a rhetoric function. We argue that the variability in gesture-speech timing results from speakers' strategic use of gesture.
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