The effect of beat gestures produced by a native Spanish speaker on their comprehensibility, intelligibility, and persuasiveness as perceived by native and non-native interlocutors.
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2022-06-23
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en
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This study investigated the effect of beat gestures on speaker perception. The purpose of the study was to measure comprehensibility, intelligibility, and persuasiveness as perceived by Spanish native and non-native interlocutors when seeing or not seeing a beat gesture. Knowing more about these effects will help people in different settings to convince each other and make sure the message is understood. It is important to compare L1 and L2 speakers since nowadays there is a lot of international communication. We wanted to get more insight into the processing of verbal and nonverbal aspects of L1 and L2 speakers. Videos were used, in which a speaker utters sentences containing verbs with different lexical stress. Participants were assigned to either the condition with or without beat gestures. They had to write down what they heard and rate the speaker in terms of comprehensibility and persuasiveness. The results showed that the presence or absence of a beat gesture did not affect intelligibility. Using beat gestures led to being more persuasive. However, the presence of a beat gesture led to being less comprehensible. Thus, using a beat gesture can only be supportive for being persuasive, and not for being intelligible or comprehensible.
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