ANTHRO 33 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Cognitive Load, Speech Disfluency
Document Summary
Ideologies can influence how we look at data. Meta-analysis looking at gender differences found little variation. Within-gender variability is typically larger than between gender variability. Sample of student speech found that both male and female students spoke ~16,000 words per day. Ideas about what is feminine vs masculine speech change over time and from place to place. Not a sign language (doesn"t follow rules) Is produced with speech 90% of the time. Rarely combined into long sequences (like sentences) Emerges spontaneously (and is hard to stop) Prevent people from gesturing speech shows more disfluencies. Gesture strokes occur with rhythm of speech. Synchronization of movement and vocalization starts to emerge early in infancy (at 9-15 weeks) Gesture is both for the self and others. We gesture on the phone or behind barrier. We adjust co-speech gestures to orientation or visual presence of audience. Gesture reduces cognitive load during difficult thought processes.
