GESTURAL DISFLUENCIES IN DIALOGUE

This paper presents a study concerning gesture disfluencies which is based on the multimodal corpus Russian Pears Chats and Stories (www.multidiscourse.ru). Similarly to speech disfluencies, we have described gesture falstarts (interrupted or aborted gestures) and hesitations (gestures with lengthened preparations or retractions) and suggested the procedure for marking these items in the corpus in relation to turn-taking. We have studied three interactions (total duration approximately 30 min). It has been shown that a huge variety of gesticulation among speakers is observed. Beat gestures have not been taken into account as they are too short and sharp. Pragmatic gestures (also called recurrent gestures or gesture families) display consistency of formal features in different contexts, so they often can be reduced or abbreviated. These two groups of gestures have not been included in the study.

We have found 70 cases of gesture disfluencies, about 80 % of which are falstarts, and others are hesitations. About two thirds of the disfluencies coincide with the end or the beginning of a turn. It allows us to speculate about an important role that gesture disfluencies play in turn-taking. Most of them (26 %) occur in the last phrase of the speaker in the turn, marking passing turn to the listener, although gesture disfluencies can appear in other contexts too.