Speaker: Yağmur Deniz Kısa, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Title: A communicative account of gesturing when speaking is difficult

Abstract: People gesture when they speak, especially when speaking is difficult. Why? According to an influential answer to this question, people gesture when speaking is difficult because gestures facilitate speech production – serving a cognitive function for the speaker. In Study 1, we aim to conceptually replicate the finding that preventing gestures makes speakers more disfluent – the primary finding that has been interpreted as evidence for this influential hypothesis. Contrary to long-held beliefs, we show that there is, in fact, no support for the claim that preventing gestures impairs speaking – in a large dataset and re-examining five decades of empirical evidence cited for this claim. If gestures do not help speech production, why then are people more likely to gesture when speaking is difficult? To answer this question, we propose and test an alternative explanation. Gesturing when speaking is difficult may not be a mere symptom of speaking difficulties. And gesturing may not be produced to help speakers resolve these difficulties, either. Instead, gesturing when speaking is difficult may be communicatively motivated. In Study 2, we show that speakers are more likely to gesture when they are disfluent because gestures serve as a pragmatic signal to the listener commenting on experiencing problems with speaking. When gestures were not visible and therefore could not serve as a pragmatic signal to the listener, they were not more likely to occur during disfluent speech than fluent speech. Together, these studies motivate a revision to theories of why people gesture. People gesture when speaking is difficult, because gestures provide a communicative signal to the listener, commenting on the process of speaking.

Speaker’s Bio

Yağmur Deniz Kısa completed her Psychology and Philosophy in Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Daniel Casasanto and Susan Goldin-Meadow, with a dissertation on why people gesture when they speak. Since Summer 2022, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the Comparative Cultural Psychology department, working on how culture shapes spatial thinking.

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