Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and postlexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction

• Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0 peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level prominence, there are three different configurations of lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest differences between the three types of peaks concerning which types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how well these landmarks align with each other, although these differences did not reach significance.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

prosody

hand gesture

prominence

temporal alignment

Swedish

Lingvistik

Linguistics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)