Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Department of Human Development, Cornell University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Jun;151(6):1252-1271. doi: 10.1037/xge0001135. Epub 2021 Dec 2.
Why do people gesture when they speak? According to one influential proposal, the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH), gestures serve a cognitive function in speakers' minds by helping them find the right spatial words. Do gestures also help speakers find the right words when they talk about abstract concepts that are spatialized metaphorically? If so, then preventing people from gesturing should increase the rate of disfluencies during speech about both literal and metaphorical space. Here, we sought to conceptually replicate the finding that preventing speakers from gesturing increases disfluencies in speech with literal spatial content (e.g., the rocket went up), which has been interpreted as evidence for the LRH, and to extend this pattern to speech with metaphorical spatial content (e.g., my grades went up). Across three measures of speech disfluency (disfluency rate, speech rate, and rate of nonjuncture filled pauses), we found no difference in disfluency between speakers who were allowed to gesture freely and speakers who were not allowed to gesture, for any category of speech (literal spatial content, metaphorical spatial content, and no spatial content). This large dataset (7,969 phrases containing 2,075 disfluencies) provided no support for the idea that gestures help speakers find the right words, even for speech with literal spatial content. Upon reexamining studies cited as evidence for the LRH and related proposals over the past 5 decades, we conclude that there is, in fact, no reliable evidence that preventing gestures impairs speaking. Together, these findings challenge long-held beliefs about why people gesture when they speak. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
人们说话时为什么会做手势？根据一个有影响力的提议，即词汇检索假说（LRH），手势在说话者的大脑中具有认知功能，帮助他们找到合适的空间词汇。当人们谈论隐喻化的抽象概念时，手势是否也有助于他们找到合适的词汇？如果是这样，那么阻止人们做手势应该会增加他们在谈论字面和隐喻空间时出现不流畅的比率。在这里，我们试图复制这样一个发现，即阻止说话者做手势会增加具有字面空间内容（例如，火箭上升）的演讲中的不流畅程度，这被解释为 LRH 的证据，并将这种模式扩展到具有隐喻空间内容的演讲中（例如，我的成绩提高了）。在言语不流畅的三个衡量标准（不流畅率、语速和非连接填充停顿率）中，我们发现，在任何类别的言语中（字面空间内容、隐喻空间内容和无空间内容），允许自由做手势的说话者和不允许做手势的说话者之间的言语不流畅程度没有差异。这个大数据集（包含 2075 次不流畅的 7969 个短语）没有为手势有助于说话者找到合适词汇的观点提供任何支持，即使是对于具有字面空间内容的演讲也是如此。重新审查了过去 50 年来被引用为 LRH 和相关提议证据的研究后，我们得出的结论是，实际上，没有可靠的证据表明阻止手势会妨碍说话。这些发现共同挑战了人们长期以来对为什么人们在说话时会做手势的看法。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
