William Kuch
Pronouns: they/them
Research Mentor(s): Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program:
Authors: William Kuch, Cynthia Lee, Sarah Ashby, Alison McGrath, Marisa Soto, Vikas Tatineni
Session: Session 6: 3:40 pm – 4:30 pm
Poster: 85
Abstract
Speech and co-speech gestures are inextricably linked phenomena in both the production and perception of language. The prosodic structure of a language—that is, the suprasegmental features of a language that communicate phrasal organization and prominence—has long been thought to be related to co-speech gestures; recent studies suggest that there is in fact a relationship between the prosodic structure of a language and the accompanying co-speech gestures, in that such gestures are timed to the prominent syllables in a prosodic phrase (Swerts & Krahmer 2010, Mendoza-Denton & Jannedy 2011, Esteve-Gibert & Prieto 2013, Parrell et al. 2014). Our study aims to investigate the temporal coordination between the prosodic structure of an utterance and the co-speech gestures that accompany it, namely the beat gestures that occur at prosodic boundaries of a phrase. Native speakers of both English and Seoul Korean were selected as participants, and both groups of participants were asked to read a children’s story designed for this study in their native language while video and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) data were collected. Collected video data was subsequently analyzed by researchers, who marked movements of the eyebrows and head that they deemed linguistically significant (e.g. eyebrow raises/furrows, head nods, etc.). After two researchers labeled the same data, a third researcher would mark any discrepancies that arose and make the final judgment on whether or not a label should be kept. While analysis of the data collected is still ongoing, we have observed that many of the marked co-speech fall on the most prominent (i.e. stressed) words in a phrase structure, lending credence to our hypothesis that the utterances and the accompanying co-speech gestures produced by the language users are mediated by prosodic structure of the language.
