Ana-Patricia Collazo
Pronouns: She/ her
Research Mentor(s): Jelena Krivokapic
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 3 (11:00am – 11:50am)
Authors: Ana Collazo, Jelena Krivokapic, Ruaridh Purse
Abstract
In a conversational interaction, speakers take turns speaking. This study was undertaken to investigate the effect turn-taking has on the kinematic properties of speech gestures (consonant and vowel gestures) and on pauses. There were two competing hypotheses in this experiment. The first was that turn-final phrase-final gestures are longer than turn-medial phrase-final gestures through association with a hierarchically higher prosodic boundary. The second was that turn-final phrase-final gestures are shorter than turn-medial phrase-final gestures because of the reduced speech planning load that speakers have at the end of their conversational turn. In order to test these hypotheses a tangram solving game was created. In the game there were two target words: Mima and Nana. These words were created because their kinematic properties can be examined well. In the game, participants could ask one or two questions which allowed the target words to be in turn-medial and in turn-final positions, making it possible to examine the differences in the lengthening. Electromagnetic Articulography was used to gather data. To analyze consonant and vowel gestures, sensors were placed on the articulators to track their movements, such as the movement of opening and closing lips for the consonant “m†in “Mimaâ€. Pause durations were measured in order to ascertain the correct prosodic structure. Results show that turn-medial phrase-final boundaries show a small effect of final lengthening. Turn-final phrase-final gestures are all shorter than turn-medial phrase-final gestures, and even for some speakers shorter than phrase-medial gestures. The results overall support the second hypothesis: Because the speaker finished speaking at the turn-final phrase-final boundary, there is less planning, and therefore the speech gestures are shorter than the turn-medial phrase-final gestures, where the speaker needs to plan what they are going to say next.
