The use and mimicry of co-speech gestures as a strategy to overcome noise in face-to-face dialogue.
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2023-03-06
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en
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Abstract
This thesis looks into the effect of background noise on the usage and mimicry of co-speech manual gestures in face-to-face dialogue. It is clear from previous research that in adverse listening conditions, listeners attend to visual information to assist comprehension of the degraded speech signal. However, it is unclear how speakers strategically modulate their gestures to accommodate for the decrease of speech intelligibility and what the role of gestural mimicry is in such adverse listening conditions. The present study analyses the number of representational co-speech gestures and instances of mimicry of interlocutors engaged in face-to-face dyadic conversation in noise and in a clear-speech condition.
Forty-eight native speakers of Dutch have participated in the study. It was found that interlocutors gestured more in the noise condition than they did in the clear-speech condition. No effect of noise on the amount of gestural mimicry was found. The finding that we gesture more when listening conditions are adverse implies that shifting our communicative efforts from one communicative modality to another is strategic and context dependent. This supports the idea that language and communication are inherently multimodal in nature. Speech and gesture are integrated to achieve one’s communicative goals. Further research is needed to uncover what role gesture mimicry plays in overcoming adverse listening conditions.
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Faculteit der Letteren