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ABSTRACT
People are more disfluent in their second language (L2) than their first language (L1). Gesturing facilitates cognitive processes, including speech production. This study investigates speech disfluency and representational gesture production across Turkish-English bilinguals’ L1 (Turkish) and L2 (English) through a narrative retelling task (N = 27). Results showed that people were more disfluent and used more representational gestures in English. Controlling for L2 proficiency, people were still more disfluent in English. The more people were proficient in L2, the more they used gestures in that language. Similarly, disfluency-gesture co-occurrences were more common in English. L2 proficiency was positively correlated with the likelihood of a disfluency being accompanied by a gesture. These findings suggest that gestures may not necessarily compensate for weak language skills. Rather, people might gesture during disfluent moments if they can detect their errors, suggesting a close link between representational gestures and language competency in benefiting from gestures when disfluent.
Acknowledgments
We thank Mine Yürekli and Demet Özer for their contribution in the initial stages of the study. We also thank Fatma Nur Yılmaz and Mehmet Kaya for their help in the transcription and coding processes. Last, we thank Isa Sertan Karabıyıklı for making our lives easier with his fantastic coding skills.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data for the experiment is available at https://osf.io/d6ngm/.
Notes
1 Since we focused solely on representational gestures, the question of which gestures attract more disfluencies is beyond the scope of the current study.