The impact of interpreting students’ gestures and speech content on speech fluency of consecutive interpreting

Gestures, as non-verbal cues, are found to overcome lexical limitations, address grammatical challenges, and improve speech by helping maintain spatial imagery during the lexical search process. Speech content involving spatial imagery tends to elicit greater reliance on gestures. However, little attention was given to exploring the role of interpreting students' gestures in speech performance, particularly in terms of fluency. This study examined the fluency performance of 17 interpreting students, focusing on their speech rate, average pause length, disfluency rate, and disfluency duration. The interpreting students were asked to complete four consecutive interpreting tasks under two conditions: Free Gesture (F) and Restricted Gesture (R). This study employed an experimental design and conducted post - task interviews to investigate the impact of gestures on the speech fluency performance of interpreting students. The findings indicated that restricting gestures leads to a significant increase in both disfluency duration and disfluency rate among interpreting students. In contrast, there were no statistically significant differences in speech rate or average pause length between conditions. Moreover, when interpreting spatial content, the absence of gestures was associated with further significant increases in disfluency duration and disfluency rate. This indicated that gestures partially facilitate speech fluency, particularly when processing complex spatial information. Additionally, the overall fluency of interpreting students appears to be closely linked to their proficiency in switching languages. These findings highlight the significant role of gestures in enhancing interpreting students' performance and suggest avenues for further exploration of gestures' impact on various aspects of interpreting.