McLaren Lindsey
Pronouns: he/him/his
Research Mentor(s): Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: McLaren Lindsey, Yoonjeong Lee, Lynn Yambaye, Vikas Tatineni, Jelena Krivokapic
Abstract
Numerous studies have corroborated that beat-like co-speech gestures are often employed to mark prosodic phrasing and are timed to prominent syllables [Swerts & Krahmer 2010; Mendoza-Denton & Jannedy 2011; Esteve-Gibert & Prieto 2013; Parrell et al. 2014]. Few studies have explored the temporal coordination of vocal tract and co-speech gestures with phrasal boundaries. Our recent study with eight native speakers of Korean suggests that co-speech manual beat gestures are temporally aligned with both phrase-edge segment and tone gestures [Lee et al. JASA 152, A199 (2022)]. The present study examines non-manual co-speech head and eyebrow movement using the same eight Korean speakers from Lee et al. (2022). The present study tests the variation of the movement and temporal alignment of vocal tract actions and co-occurring gesticulator movement near phrasal boundaries and under the effects of prominence. We expect to find that co-speech head and eyebrow movements cooccur with prosodic phrases in Seoul Korean. Movements of the lips, tongue, eyebrows, and head were tracked using electromagnetic articulography (EMA); visual signals of the hands and face were taken with cameras. The visual and kinematic data were analyzed using a MATLAB software to calculate the onset and peak of beat gesture movements. The measurements that indicate the inter-articulatory coordination include the duration from the onset of various concurrent beat gestures to phrasal landmarks. So far, we have observed that co-speech gestures are temporally aligned to prominent syllables around phrasal boundaries. This finding makes sense because speakers of Seoul Korean insert a phrasal boundary to emphasize a word in the spoken utterance. Future work will investigate the timing of co-speech gestures in languages with different prosodic structures. In addition, to determine the validity of more accessible methods of tracking and measuring movement, we have begun comparing measurements taken from EMA and those compiled by a free software, OpenFace. We hope to find that less expensive and more accessible means of measurement that can be a reliable alternative to expensive EMA. The findings of this study and their implications will be discussed.
