Word Familiarity Predicts Temporal Asynchrony of Hand Gestures and Speech

Seventeen Ss were videotaped as they provided narrative descriptions of 13 photographs. Judgments from 129 naive untrained Ss were used to isolate 60 speech-related gestures and their lexical affiliates (i.e., the accompanying word or phrase judged as related in meaning) from these 221 narratives. A computer-video interface measured each gesture, and a 3rd group of Ss rated word familiarity of each lexical affiliate. Multiple regression revealed that gesture onset preceded voice onset by an interval whose magnitude was inversely related to the lexical affiliate's rated familiarity. The lexical affiliate's familiarity was also inversely related to gesture duration. Results suggest that difficulty encountered during lexical access affects both gesture and speech. Familiarity's systematic relations with gesture-speech asynchrony and gesture duration make it unlikely that speech and gesture are produced independently by autonomous modules.