Scientists say that people gesture with their voicesBy Michael Conlon
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists reported on Friday what they said was the first scientific evidence that people unconsciously gesture with their voices.
"This is an aspect of language that has never been explored," and one that could shed insight into the way that people think, said Howard Nusbaum, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.
Nusbaum coauthored a paper in the Journal of Memory and Language that reported on a group of experiments said to provide the first evidence of "analog acoustic expression" -- people unconsciously modulating their voices in ways that provide an additional channel of expression understood by others.
"We have only looked so far at the simplest, most obvious forms of this communication. We will doubtless find more when we look at more complicated, less obvious forms," Nusbaum said.
He added in an interview the phenomenon probably existed across all languages, although it may be shaped in the same way that different languages help determine physical gestures.
It would be difficult to determine if such verbal gestures played a role in evolution, he said, although one speculative piece of research has concluded gestures preceded language.
In one experiment, people looked at video screens with animated dots and described whether they saw them going up or going down. Separately, they read the sentences "It is going up" or "It is going down" without any visuals.
In watching the dots go up, their pitch rose as they followed the action, and lowered when the dots went down. The same thing also happened when they read the sentences.
"The results demonstrate that speakers naturally use analog acoustic expression when talking, even when there is no intent to dramatize a description," the study said.
In another pair of experiments, people describing the movement of a dot from left to right spoke faster as it moved faster. When recordings of what they said were played, listeners were able to determine which speaker was describing a fast-moving dot and which a slow-moving one.