The sound of silence: the functions of gestures in pauses in native and non-native interaction

Face-to-face communication is a multimodal phenomenon that occurs within a sociocultural context (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). It involves speech, gestures, gaze, head movements, and body movements (Levinson & Holler, 2014; Moreno-Cabrera, 2011; Vigliocco, Perniss, & Vinson, 2014), and to understand it completely all of these aspects must be taken into consideration (Gerwing, & Dalby, 2014; Tenjes, 2001). Face-to-face communication also varies depending on the social situation, the roles of the participants, the identity of the participants, and the task that they are involved in. To date, most studies on co-speech gestures in communication have analyzed how gestures relate to speech, and gestures produced during speech pauses have been less examined. In this chapter, we examine the functions of co-speech gestures during pauses. We propose that in addition to the functions that have already been identified: lexical search (production oriented) and turn giving/taking (interaction oriented), there is another function that is directed to an interlocutor and whose purpose is to support comprehension (comprehension oriented). We illustrate these functions through examples of interactions between native speakers of French and their interlocutors: native and non-native speakers of French. We first discuss co-speech gestures, next speech pauses and gestures, then the specifics of interaction between a native and a non-native speaker and how it affects both speech and gesture production (foreigner talk and gestures).