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Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically-prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this relationship? Here, we examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production. We provide novel evidence that words uttered with accompanying co-speech gestures are produced with more extreme tongue and jaw displacement, and that presence of a co-speech gesture contributes to greater temporal stability of oral articulatory movements. This effect–which we term coupling enhancement–differs from stress-based hyperarticulation in that differences in articulatory magnitude are not vowel-specific in their patterning. Speech and gesture synergies therefore constitute an independent variable to consider when modeling the effects of prosodic prominence on articulatory patterns. Our results are consistent with work in language acquisition and speech-motor control suggesting that synchronizing speech to gesture can entrain acoustic prominence.
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GESTURAL ALIGNMENT AND ACCOMMODATION IN SPEAKER-LISTENER HEAD GESTURES
The timing of both manual co-speech gestures and head gestures is sensitive to prosodic structure of speech. However, head gesters are used not only by speakers, but also by listeners as a backchanneling device. Little research exists on the timing of gestures in back-channeling. To address this gap, we compare timing of listener and speaker head gestures in an interview context. Results reveal the dual role that head gestures play in speech and conversational interaction: while they are coordinated in key ways to one’s own speech, they are also coordinated to the gestures (and hence, the speech) of a conversation partner when one is actively listening to them. We also show that head gesture timing is sensitive to social dynamics between interlocutors. This study provides a novel contribution to literature on head gesture timing and has implications for studies of discourse and accommodation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2306149
- PAR ID:
- 10451416
- Editor(s):
- Skarnitzl, R. &
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
- ISSN:
- 0301-3162
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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