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Gestures for emphasis

المؤلف:  Paul Warren

المصدر:  Introducing Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P91

2025-11-04

459

Gestures for emphasis

When we talk we place greater emphasis or stress on some words than on others, usually because they carry more important information, or because we wish to reinforce some idea. Batonic or beat gestures tend to coincide in time with the stressed syllables of speech and probably therefore reinforce the stresses, helping to bring home a point. Consider the example in 6.8 from the author’s own observation.

This utterance was accompanied by a downward chopping gesture on each instance of not, and on the final word, first. These gestures serve to accentuate the importance of meeting the requirements being described, but also perhaps indicate the exasperation felt by the speaker.

One study looked at the incidence of beat gestures in different phases of the hesitant and fluent speech cycles discussed in Chapter 2, and suggested that beat gestures are more likely when the speaker has their output under greater control, since they occurred more frequently in fluent than in hesitant phases. This is compatible with the idea that batonic gestures are a deliberate emphatic device.