Аннотация:In everyday communication, we often hear speech disfluencies (pauses,
falstarts, hesitations, self-corrections). During the last decades we have known a
lot about gestures accompanying speech, these two channels of communication
being closely interlinked. So, we can expect similar phenomena in gesticulation
too. While there are already many studies concerning speech disfluencies, the
question of the specificity and the very existence of such gesture disfluencies is yet
to be studied. In this study, using the material of the multimodal corpus “Stories
and talks about pears” (www.multidiscouse.ru), we have compared irregularities in
speech and gestures. By analogy with speech failures, gestural falstarts (unfinished
gestures) and hesitations (decelerated preparation or retraction phases of gesture)
were singled out. As speech disfluencies, strong and weak falstarts (Kibrik,
Podlesskaya, 2006) and breaks of prosodic units caused by interference of other
interlocutors were studied.
Although there is great variation between the speakers, one can notice
some prominent patterns. While verbal failures occur much more often than
gestures (about 6 times), they can be combined in different ways: about half
of the gesture falstarts occur in the same EDU (elementary discursive units
approximately corresponding to simple sentences) where there are speech failures.
The fact that gestural and speech malfunctions occur independently but can be
combined in one EDU suggests that these two channels of communication —
verbal and gestural — are interrelated but have some autonomy.