Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We gesture when we talk. Nonetheless, our speech is disfluent at times. The present study investigated whether ges-tures accompanying disfluencies may facilitate speech production by shortening the duration of disfluencies. FourteenEnglish-speaking adults were presented with educational videos and told to teach others after seeing these videos. Alltheir disfluencies and gestures were coded. Results reveal that disfluencies accompanied by representational gestures aresignificantly shorter as compared to if they had been accompanied by non-representational gestures or no gestures at all.There was no significant difference in duration between disfluencies accompanied by the latter two. This suggests thatrepresentational gestures may play a role in aiding speakers in the resumption of their speech. Implications for models ofhow gestures may help speech production are discussed.