Scientists say that people gesture with their voices
By Michael Conlon
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists reported on Friday what they said
was the first scientific evidence that people unconsciously gesture
with their voices.
"This is an aspect of language that has never been explored," and
one that could shed insight into the way that people think, said
Howard Nusbaum, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the
University of Chicago.
Nusbaum coauthored a paper in the Journal of Memory and Language
that reported on a group of experiments said to provide the first
evidence of "analog acoustic expression" -- people unconsciously
modulating their voices in ways that provide an additional channel
of expression understood by others.
"We have only looked so far at the simplest, most obvious forms of
this communication. We will doubtless find more when we look at
more complicated, less obvious forms," Nusbaum said.
He added in an interview the phenomenon probably existed across all
languages, although it may be shaped in the same way that different
languages help determine physical gestures.
It would be difficult to determine if such verbal gestures played a
role in evolution, he said, although one speculative piece of
research has concluded gestures preceded language.
In one experiment, people looked at video screens with animated
dots and described whether they saw them going up or going down.
Separately, they read the sentences "It is going up" or "It is
going down" without any visuals.
In watching the dots go up, their pitch rose as they followed the
action, and lowered when the dots went down. The same thing also
happened when they read the sentences.
"The results demonstrate that speakers naturally use analog
acoustic expression when talking, even when there is no intent to
dramatize a description," the study said.
In another pair of experiments, people describing the movement of a
dot from left to right spoke faster as it moved faster. When
recordings of what they said were played, listeners were able to
determine which speaker was describing a fast-moving dot and which
a slow-moving one.