Exercise 6.1

The prediction is that your participant will find the task more difficult when they cannot use their hands to gesture. This would indicate that gestures play an important role in helping speakers to organise their speech production, to find words from memory, etc. Of course there are many possible confounding factors that you might need to take into account, such as how well your participant knows the route to be described, how well they warm to the task the first time they do it, so that the second time is easier, and so on.