Distribution of Kinesic Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous Speech

Abstract

Forty college student volunteers, equally divided by sex, participated in a study of vocal hesitations and kinesic hesitation phenomena in an anxiety-producing interview conducted by male and female interviewers. The vocal hesitations were of Mahl's non-ah type and included sentence change, repetition, stutter, omission, sentence incompletion, tongue slip, and intruding incoherent sounds. The kinesic hesitation phenomena included head, hand, arm, leg, and foot movement, posture change, and body shift. The results showed a close relationship between the occurrences of vocal hesitations and movement. Additionally, they showed clear differences in the frequency of occurrence of the kinds of vocal hesitations and movements. Finally, it was found that the most common location of a kinesic phenomenon is just before or simultaneously with a nonfluency rather than after one. The findings lend support to the idea that vocal and nonvocal behaviors may not always be so interdependent as parallel.