Manifestations of lexical retrieval struggle and the role of iconic gestures in lexical retrieval
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2019-12-18
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
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.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren