Talking with your hands helps listeners separate an obJECT from an OBject

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-01-27 11:01

International

Talking with your hands, or specifically what is known as 'beat gestures', can influence what speech sounds we perceive and can help people pick up stresses on different parts of a word, for example distinguishing OBject from obJECT. Beat gestures are movements of the hand, such as an up and down movement, that speakers spontaneously produce to highlight prominent aspects of speech. The researchers found these beat gestures can impact people's perception stresses on different parts of a word and can – in turn – even shape what vowels we think we hear. The researchers say this can even create a sort of auditory Illusion which could make you hear a short instead of a long vowel sound or vice versa. So next time you enter a face-to-face conversation: wash your hands, and use them!

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Beat gestures are very common in everyday face-to-face conversations. Moreover, talkers align their beat gestures very precisely to the prominent words in speech. Yet we know very little about what role these simple 'flicks of the hands' play in spoken language comprehension. We demonstrate across a set of six experiments that beat gestures influence the perception of lexical stress (e.g., distinguishing DIScount from disCOUNT in English). This effect of beat gestures on lexical stress perception can – in turn – even shape what vowels we think we hear. Thus, we provide evidence for a ‘manual McGurk effect’ (after the classic McGurk effect) supporting a recent multimodal, situated psycholinguistic framework of human communication. So next time you enter a face-to-face conversation: wash your hands, and use them!

Multimedia

Beat gestures

Attachments

Note: Not all attachments are visible to the general public. Research URLs will go live after the embargo ends.

Video The Royal Society, Web page More videos available here

Research The Royal Society, Web page Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands

Funder: This research was supported by the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, Munich, Germany (H.R.B.; D.P.) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (D.P.; Veni grant no. 275-89-037). We would like to thank Giulio Severijnen for help in creating the pseudowords of Experiment 1A, Birgit Knudsen for annotating the video recordings, and Nora Kennis, Esther de Kerf, and Myriam Weiss for their help in testing participants and annotating the shadowing recordings.

Media Contact/s

Contact details are only visible to registered journalists.