Gesture inhibition and emotional content selectively modulate long silent pauses in autobiographical narratives

Gestures and silent pauses are fundamental in comprehension and communication of emotional speech. While previous research has examined gesture inhibition primarily in neutral or fictional speech tasks with mixed findings, an empirical study on the effect of gesture inhibition on silent pause behaviour during personal emotional autobiographical narratives is yet not examined. The present study addresses this gap. Thirty participants (15 gesture-restricted, 15 non-restricted; aged 18-23) narrated personal negative emotional memories and neutral daily routine in Hindi-English bilingual speech. Silent pauses were categorized by duration into short (250-500 ms), medium (500-1000 ms) and long (more than 1000 ms) pauses, based on distinct cognitive and affective functions. Pause count, duration, and proportion were analysed using linear and generalized linear mixed-effects models on 4242 individual pauses. Emotional narratives consistently produced more frequent, longer, and proportionately larger long pauses than neutral narratives across both gesture conditions, with no comparable effects on shorter pauses. Gesture-restriction selectively increased long-pause counts in both narrative contexts, with directionally consistent but smaller effects on long-pause duration and proportion. Short and medium pauses showed no significant contrast effects across groups and narratives. The findings indicate that emotional content and gesture restriction selectively modulate the long-pause range associated with higher-order cognitive and affective processing, while leaving shorter segmenting pauses unaffected. Results are discussed within gesture-for-conceptualization and embodied emotion frameworks.