Past research suggests that speakers gesture more when motor simulations are more strongly activated. We investigate whether simulations of a perceptual nature also influence gesture production. Participants viewed animations of a spider moving with a manner of motion that was either highly salient (n = 29) or less salient (n = 31) and then…

Effective collaboration between student peers is not spontaneous. A system that can measure collaboration in real-time may be useful, as it could alert an instructor to pairs that need help in collaborating effectively. We tested whether superficial measures of speech and user interface actions would suffice for measuring collaboration. Pairs of…

People spontaneously gesture when they speak (co-speech gestures) and when they solve problems silently (co-thought gestures). In this study, we first explored the relationship between these 2 types of gestures and found that individuals who produced co-thought gestures more frequently also produced co-speech gestures more frequently (Experiments…

Communication is shaped both by what we are trying to say and by whom we are saying it to. We examined whether and how shared information influences the gestures speakers produce along with their speech. Unlike prior work examining effects of common ground on speech and gesture, we examined a situation in which some speakers have the same amount…

This study investigates how epistemic stance is encoded and perceived in face-to-face communication when language is regarded as comprised by speech and gesture. Two studies were conducted with this goal in mind. The first study consisted of a production task in which participants performed opinion reports. Results showed that speakers communicate…

Little research has focused on extended concurrent speech, unexpected floor taking, or topic switching, since it has been deemed rare (Schegloff 2000. "Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation." "Language in Society" 29(1). 1-63.) or inappropriate (Goldberg 1990." Interrupting the discourse on…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

The present study sets out to explore the distinctive roles played by two working memory (WM) components in various aspects of L2 task-based speech planning and performance. A group of 40 post-intermediate proficiency level Chinese EFL learners took part in the empirical study. Following the tenets and basic principles of the…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

When watching others describe events, does information from their speech and gestures affect our memory representations for the gist and surface form of the described events? Does our reliance on these memory representations change over time? Forty participants watched videos of stories narrated by an actor. Each story included three target events…

This longitudinal study investigated teachers' use of the first language (L1) in two French foreign language (FL) intermediate level classes at two Australian universities. A native French-speaking teacher (NS) and a non-native French-speaking teacher (NNS) were observed and audio-recorded approximately every two weeks over a 12- week semester.…

People were trained to decode noise-vocoded speech by hearing monosyllabic stimuli in distorted and unaltered forms. When later presented with different stimuli, listeners were able to successfully generalize their experience. However, generalization was modulated by the degree to which testing stimuli resembled training stimuli: Testing stimuli's…