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Research on hand gestures shows that our audience is more likely to pay attention to what we say, and to remember it, when our words are accompanied by these movements. But there might be another factor at play here: making gestures may change the way our voice sounds.
Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Connecticut published a study showing that listeners could tell if a speaker was making a gesture, simply from hearing a recording of the speaker's voice. What's more, listeners could accurately guess what that gesture was.
The human voice "carries an acoustic signature" of bodily movement, the authors write. In other words, "the human voice contains information about dynamic bodily states"—information that we use to synchronize our own bodily states with those of others.
This new research, they note, "dovetails with remarkable findings that speakers in conversation who cannot see and only hear each other tend to synchronize their postural sway (i.e., the slight and nearly imperceptible movement needed to keep a person upright)."
I love the idea that, through our gestures, and the way our gestures change the sound of our voices, we are continually creating embodied connections with our conversation partners—connections that help us understand each other better. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11364
