Lynn Yambaye
Pronouns: She/Her
Research Mentor(s): Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: Lynn Yambaye, Yoonjeong Lee, McLaren Lindsey, Vikas Tatineni, Jelena Krivokapic
Abstract
Speech is often accompanied by bodily gestures that speakers use to convey the importance of certain words (i.e., co-speech gestures). The present study aims to examine how the linguistic structure influences the way people temporally coordinate the multimodal gestures to communicate. Our focus is on the co-speech head movement in Korean, a language in which the role of co-speech gesture has not been unexplored. Eight Korean speakers were recorded as they read a children’s story. Using electromagnetic articulography, we point-tracked the movements of the vocal tract articulators and head of the participants. The co-speech head gestures were first labeled by visually inspecting the video signals, and the kinematic properties of the corresponding head movement and co-occurring vocal tract gestures (i.e., the lips, tongue tip, and tongue body) were labeled. Head nods are frequently observed when speakers highlight a particularly important part of the story. Moreover, greater ranges of the head movement are associated with the emphasized message in speech. The quantitative analysis of the exact timing between different modalities is currently underway, and the results of the cross-modal temporal organization will be discussed.
