Robert M. Krauss

Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production

In a within-subjects design that varied whether speakers were allowed to gesture and the difficulty of lexical access, speakers were videotaped as they described animated action cartoons to a listener When speakers were permitted to gesture, they gestured more often during phrases with spatial content than during phrases with other content Speech with spatial content was less fluent when speakers could not gesture than when they could gesture, speech with nonspatial content was not affected by gesture condition Preventing gesturing increased the relative frequency of nonjuncture filled pauses in speech with spatial content, but not in speech with other content Overall, the effects of preventing speakers from gesturing resembled those of increasing the difficulty of lexical access by other means, except that the effects of gesture restriction were specific to speech with spatial content The findings support the hypothesis that gestural accompaniments to spontaneous speech can facilitate access to the mental lexicon

Studies of interpersonal bargaining

A bargain is defined in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary as &dquo;an agreement between parties settling what each shall give and receive in a transaction between them&dquo;; it is further specified that a bargain is &dquo;an agreement or compact viewed as advantageous or the reverse.&dquo; When the term &dquo;agreement&dquo; is broadened to include tacit, informal agreements as well as explicit agreements, it is evident that bargains and the processes involved in arriving at bargains (&dquo;bargaining&dquo;) are pervasive characteristics of social life. The definition of &dquo;bargain&dquo; fits under sociological definitions of the term &dquo;social norm.&dquo; In this light, it may be seen that the experimental study of the bargaining process and of bargaining outcomes provides a means for the laboratory study of the development of certain types of social norms. It is well to recognize, however, that bargaining situations have certain dis-

Nonverbal Behavior and Nonverbal Communication: What do Conversational Hand Gestures Tell Us?

Publisher Summary This chapter explores how gestures contribute to comprehension, how gesturing affect speech and what can be learned from studying conversational gestures. The primary function of conversational hand gestures is to aid in the formulation of speech. Gestures can convey nonsemantic information. The study of speech and gestures overlaps with the study of person perception and attribution processes. The significance of gestures can be ambiguous and will affect the meanings and consequences to the observed gestures. A topology of gestures is adopters, symbolic gestures, and conversational gestures. Different types of conversational gestures can be distinguished as—namely, motor movements and lexical movements. Conversational hand gestures have been assumed to convey semantic information. Several studies that attempt to assess the kinds of information conversational gestures convey to naive observers and the extent to which gestures enhance the communicativeness of spoken messages are described in the chapter.

Facial and autonomic manifestations of the dimensional structure of emotion.

Abstract While subjects viewed and rated a series of 25 emotionally evocative slides, their heart rate and skin conductance were continuously monitored and their facial expressions were covertly videotaped. Judges subsequently viewed the videotapes and rated trial-by-trial the pleasantness and intensity of each subjects facial expressions. Both phasic skin conductance responding and judged facial intensity were curvilinearly related to self-reported pleasantness, with the largest responses occurring at both extremes of the self-report scale. In contrast, phasic cardiac reactions and judged facial pleasantness were linearly related to self-reported pleasantness; extreme pleasantness was accompanied by heart rate acceleration, and unpleasantness by cardiac deceleration. The results suggest that visceral information reflects the dimensions that underlie the organization of affects and, hence, may play a more important role in emotional experience than is assumed in a number of currently held theories of emotion.

Changes in reference phrases as a function of frequency of usage in social interaction: a preliminary study

Pairs of subjects interacted in a problem-solving task which required them to communicate about ambiguous figures. The length of the reference phrase for each figure was calculated. A negative relationship was found between the frequency with which a figure was referred to and the mean length of its reference phrase.

Word familiarity predicts temporal asynchrony of hand gestures and speech

Seventeen Ss were videotaped as they provided narrative descriptions of 13 photographs. Judgments from 129 naive untrained Ss were used to isolate 60 speech-related gestures and their lexical affiliates (i.e., the accompanying word or phrase judged as related in meaning) from these 221 narratives. A computer-video interface measured each gesture, and a 3rd group of Ss rated word familiarity of each lexical affiliate. Multiple regression revealed that gesture onset preceded voice onset by an interval whose magnitude was inversely related to the lexical affiliates rated familiarity. The lexical affiliates familiarity was also inversely related to gesture duration. Results suggest that difficulty encountered during lexical access affects both gesture and speech. Familiaritys systematic relations with gesture-speech asynchrony and gesture duration make it unlikely that speech and gesture are produced independently by autonomous modules.

Referential communication in nursery school children: Method and some preliminary findings

Abstract A method for studying referential communication in children, which requires that S s develop a nomenclature for communicating about novel forms, is described. Three experiments employing this method are reported. In the first, it was shown that 52 to 63-month-old children, unlike adults, were unable to perform the communication task with the novel forms, although they could achieve the performance criterion with a set of familiar forms. However, 33 to 49-month-old children were unable to meet performance criteria with either novel or familiar forms. Two further experiments explored the ability of children, ages 46–63 months, to utilize a nomenclature developed by adults and to respond appropriately to an intra personal (rather than an inter personal) nomenclature.

The role of gestures in spatial working memory and speech.

Co-speech gestures traditionally have been considered communicative, but they may also serve other functions. For example, hand-arm movements seem to facilitate both spatial working memory and speech production. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate speech indirectly by sustaining spatial representations in working memory. Alternatively, gestures may affect speech production directly by activating embodied semantic representations involved in lexical search. Consistent with the first hypothesis, we found participants gestured more when describing visual objects from memory and when describing objects that were difficult to remember and encode verbally. However, they also gestured when describing a visually accessible object, and gesture restriction produced dysfluent speech even when spatial memory was untaxed, suggesting that gestures can directly affect both spatial memory and lexical retrieval.

Inferring speakers’ physical attributes from their voices

Abstract Two experiments examined listeners’ ability to make accurate inferences about speakers from the nonlinguistic content of their speech. In Experiment I, naive listeners heard male and female speakers articulating two test sentences, and tried to select which of a pair of photographs depicted the speaker. On average they selected the correct photo 76.5% of the time. All performed at a level that was reliably better than chance. In Experiment II, judges heard the test sentences and estimated the speakers’ age, height, and weight. A comparison group made the same estimates from photographs of the speakers. Although estimates made from photos are more accurate than those made from voice, for age and height the differences are quite small in magnitude—a little more than a year in age and less than a half inch in height. When judgments are pooled, estimates made from photos are not uniformly superior to those made from voices.

Effects of Transmission Delay and Access Delay on the Efficiency of Verbal Communication

Two experiments were performed to investigate the effects of transmission delay and access delay, respectively, on the efficiency with which speakers verbally encoded information for transmission in a two‐person communication task. Both experiments employed echo‐free four‐wire voice circuits in an attempt to isolate each delay effect and to avoid the delayed echo effect found in commercial circuits. In the first experiment, three values of pure roundtrip transmission delay were used: no delay, 0.6 sec, and 1.8 sec. Using 14 pairs of male subjects in each condition, it was found that, whereas 1.8 sec of transmission delay deleteriously affected the efficiency of communication, subjects performed as efficiently using the 0.6‐sec delay circuit as with no delay. In the second experiment, three values of access delay were used: no delay, 0.25 sec, and 1.8 sec. Ten pairs of male subjects and 10 pairs of female subjects were run in each condition. The effect of access delay was found to be different for the two ...