Cognitive Load Increases Spoken and Gestural Hesitation Frequency

Abstract

This study investigates the interplay of spoken and gestural hesitations under varying amounts of cognitive load. We argue that not only fillers and silences, as the most common hesitations, are directly related to speech pausing behavior, but that hesitation lengthening is as well. We designed a resource-management card game as a method to elicit ecologically valid pausing behavior while being able to finely control cognitive load via card complexity. The method very successfully elicits large amounts of hesitations. Hesitation frequency increases as a function of cognitive load. This is true for both spoken and gestural hesitations. We conclude that the method presented here is a versatile tool for future research and we present foundational research on the speech-gesture link related to hesitations induced by controllable cognitive load.