When hands stop moving, interaction keeps going:A study of manual holds in the management of conversation in French-speaking and signing Belgium

This study explores moments in signed and spoken conversation when manual production is on hold and its resulting interactive ramifications. Typically, the temporal structure of gesture and sign can be decomposed into a stream of distinct manual phases. There are moments, however, when this activity is stopped. This may happen for various reasons, e.g., when seeking attention, holding the floor or during overlaps. Holds have mostly been examined in sign languages regarding prosody, syntax, and corresponding to vowel lengthening in spoken languages. In gesture studies, they have been overlooked... Mehr ...