Manifestations of lexical retrieval struggle and the role of iconic gestures in lexical retrieval
| dc.contributor.advisor | Geenen, J.G. | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Vuuren, S. van | |
| dc.contributor.author | Worku, H. | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019-12-18 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Previous research on fluency has found that language disfluency manifests itself through non-juncture pauses and the use of non-lexical fillers. Taking into account that lexical retrieval struggle is one of the main causes of disfluency, the goal of this study is to provide further indicators of disfluency that are related particularly to word retrieval. The research argues that manifestations of lexical retrieval difficulties can be found within modalities of speech, gesture, and gaze. A corpus was created through a task in which multilingual speakers were asked to watch a story and retell it in two languages. Lexical retrieval pauses were extracted from the collected corpus and analyzed in the reported case study. Patterns which repeatedly occur within lexical retrieval pauses have been targeted across modalities and include use of iconic gesture and beat gesture during pauses, increase of beat gesture with disfluency, hand-to-face gestures, comments on word retrieval difficulties, finger snapping, dental clicks, and redirection of gaze. It is argued that these patterns can be used as indicators of lexical retrieval difficulties when they co-occur with non-juncture pauses or non-lexical fillers. Second language and multilingual features as code-switching and requests for assistance have been found in these cases as well and are argued to function as manifestations of word retrieval difficulties. A second major focus of the research is directed to the question on which of these manifestations can play a facilitating role in resolving lexical difficulties. The analysis describes aforementioned manifestations of lexical difficulties and addresses theories on the facilitating role of gestures in decreasing speaker’s tension and recapturing elusive words from lexical memory. | en_US |
| dc.file.source | 5dfa4df88a12b-Thesis_Worku final.pdf | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/8916 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.thesis.faculty | Faculteit der Letteren | en_US |
| dc.thesis.specialisation | Linguistics, general programme | en_US |
| dc.thesis.studyprogramme | Master Taalwetenschappen/Linguistics | en_US |
| dc.thesis.type | Master | en_US |
| dc.title | Manifestations of lexical retrieval struggle and the role of iconic gestures in lexical retrieval | en_US |
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