Body movement and speech rhythm in social conversation.

Abstract

The relationship between body movement and speech rhythm was newly formulated following Boomer's work on hesitations in speech: movements were predicted to occur early in phonemic clauses and at points following nonfluencies within clauses. A preliminary study of old data for which the movements were located by watching motion pictures bore out the prediction, and led to a more intensive study using more representative speech samples, and recording techniques designed to eliminate possible artifacts. The results were highly significant, but the amount of movement variance accounted for was small. The data collected by this method allowed direct test of statements by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy, and by Scheflen, whose claims of very close speech-movement relationships were found to be exaggerated. The linkage found between hesitations and movements was interpreted in terms of speech encoding processes.1 This paper is an extension of one given at a symposium chaired by Paul Ekman, titled "New Approaches to the Study of Facial Expression and Body Movement," at the American Psychological Association meetings in New York, 1966.2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Allen T.

Do conversational hand gestures communicate?

“…Of course, arguments of this sort are notoriously difficult either to support or to falsify empirically, and we are inclined to agree with Nottebaum's assessment of Hewes's proposal as "a novel idea unsupported by any compelling evidence" (Nottebaum, 1973, p. 15). In a similar vein, Dittmann and Llewelyn (1969) have suggested that gestures are more-or-less random movements whose function is to dissipate tension during lexical search. The results of these studies (especially Experiment 2) reduce the plausibility of this hypothesis.…”

Lexical gestures and lexical access: a process model

“…Noting that people often gesture when they are having difficulty retrieving an elusive word from memory, Dittmann and Llewelyn (1969) have suggested that at least some gestures may be more-or-less random movements whose function is to dissipate tension during lexical search. The idea is that failures of word retrieval are frustrating, and that unless dealt with, this frustration-generated tension could interfere GSP4.2 July 30, 2001 Krauss, Chen & Got †esman -7 -with the speaker's ability to produce coherent speech.…”

Speech timing prediction in multimodal human-computer interaction

“…[Dittman & Uewellyn, 1969] observed that hand movements were particularly concentrated around the fllSt word of utterances. [Kendon, 1972] concludes from a speech sample analysis that when a bodily movement is precisely related to a word in a sentence, the movement in question begins before the corresponding word.…”