Talking Fast: The Use of Speech Rate as Iconic Gesture

This study explores the hypothesis that iconic gesture is something that people do with their mouth and voice, and not just with their hands, and further, that this vocal gesture is as profoundly integrated with spoken language as recent accounts suggest manual iconic gesture is (e.g., McNeill, 2005). Yet, unlike manual gesture, vocal gesture must be directly coordinated with the spoken linguistic message - not only in time but in articulation. It is also limited in the available iconic and metaphorical mappings that can be evoked between acoustic forms and their referents. In the present study, we look at one particular mapping of vocal gesture - people's use of the speed of their voice to represent and express information about the speed of an event or action. For example, a person might say, "Look at that little bug zippingaround" when drawing attention to a fast-moving insect.Our goal was to show that people readily use their voice this way, and to understand how and when they do. Participants watched short video clips that depicted various fast and slow events. For example, one clip showed a fish lazily swimming along, while another showed a greyhound racing around a beach. Participants watched each video and described it to an experimenter. Descriptions were completely open-ended although brief, and the interactions were fostered to be relaxed and conversational. We generally predicted that participants would use a relatively faster speech rate to talk about the fast videos and a slower rate to talk about the slow ones.Responses were recorded and later transcribed and analyzed with acoustic analysis software. Researchers have demonstrated that manual gesture and language exhibit temporal synchronicity and semantic coherence (McNeill, 2005); thus we predicted that participants would use iconic speech rate while they focused explicitly on describing the speed of the event. This was substantiated by an exploratory listen through participants' descriptions, which indicated that speech rate was modulated specifically as participants spoke adverbial phrases about speed. For instance, one participant said, "A huge fish was swimming sloooowly..." Another said, "...a dog was running around superfast." An informal survey estimated that when participants made explicit references to speed with adverbials, they used this sort of verbal gesture in at least a quarter of instances.Formal analysis considered only those participants who made explicit reference to both fast and slow speed with adverbial phrases. Speech rate was calculated for these adverbial phrases, and the rate of slow versus fast adverbials was compared for each participant. It was found that fast adverbial phrases were spoken significantly faster than slow phrases.The finding that people readily use iconic vocal gesture - utilizing the acoustic form of their voice to create imagistic representations of the world - has deep implications for the nature of cognition and communication. It suggests that our perceptions and how we communicate about them are fundamentally embodied, and importantly, that this embodied basis pervades even the acoustic expression of spoken linguistic communication.