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Speech Disfluencies and Hand Gestures as Metacognitive Cues
Begüm Yılmaz1, Reyhan Furman2, Tilbe Göksun1
1Department of Psychology, Koç University.
Cognitive Science
|August 5, 2025
Summary
Speech disfluencies and gestures predict confidence in answers, but not accuracy. Hand gestures positively relate to confidence, while speech disfluencies negatively relate, especially when gestures are frequent.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Metacognitive processes, such as monitoring and control of cognition, are crucial for learning and decision-making.
- Speech disfluencies (e.g., "uh", "um") and gestures are potential indicators of metacognitive monitoring during language production.
- The communicational setting, specifically listener visibility, may influence the production of these multimodal cues.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between speech disfluencies, gestures, and metacognitive judgments (feelings-of-knowing and retrospective confidence judgments).
- To examine whether the communicational setting affects the rate of speech disfluencies and gestures.
- To determine the predictive roles of gestures and disfluencies on metacognitive judgments.
Main Methods:
- 50 participants answered general knowledge questions under visible or nonvisible listener conditions.
- Participants provided feelings-of-knowing (FOK) judgments and engaged in think-aloud protocols.
- Retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs) were collected, alongside recordings of speech disfluencies and gestures.
Main Results:
- Neither speech disfluencies nor gestures correlated with answer accuracy or FOK judgments.
- Both gestures and speech disfluencies uniquely and interactively predicted RCJs.
- Speech disfluencies negatively predicted RCJs, whereas hand gestures positively predicted RCJs.
- The relationship between gestures and RCJs was stronger when speech disfluencies were higher.
- No significant effect of listener visibility on disfluency or gesture rates was observed.
Conclusions:
- Multimodal cues, specifically gestures and speech disfluencies, play a significant role in shaping retrospective confidence judgments.
- The interplay between different communicative signals is important for metacognitive elaboration.
- Communicational setting may not be a primary driver for the production of these specific metacognitive indicators in this context.
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