Abstract
Movements of the head and speech articulators have been observed in tandem during an alternating word pair production task driven by an accelerating rate metronome. Word pairs contrasted either onset or coda dissimilarity with same word controls. Results show that as production effort increased, so did speaker head nodding, and that nodding increased abruptly following errors. More errors occurred under faster production rates, and in coda rather than onset alternations. The greatest entrainment between head and articulators was observed at the fastest rate under coda alternation. Neither jaw coupling nor imposed prosodic stress was observed to be a primary driver of head movement. In alternating pairs, nodding frequency tracked the slower alternation rate rather than the syllable rate, interpreted as recruitment of additional degrees of freedom to stabilize the alternation pattern under increasing production rate pressure.
Highlights
Movements of the head are integral to human speech
The pattern of observed speech errors increasing by epoch demonstrates the effectiveness of the accelerating rate task for imposing pressure on production and confirms that errors occur more frequently in coda than in onset alternation
Returning to the questions raised in the Introduction, the results show clearly that head movement, as indexed by distance traveled (MVT) and peak velocity aggregated over epochs (VEL), does increase with speech production rate as driven by the increasing rate metronome
Summary
Movements of the head are integral to human speech. Casual observation of any conversational interaction reveals head nodding employed by the current speaker aligned with prosodic features and by listeners providing backchannel feedback. Head movements are used by speakers to structure discourse (Kendon, 1972), indicate deixis (Birdwhistell, 1970; McClave, 2000) flag lexical repair (McClave, 2000), and to signal a turn-taking shift (Duncan, 1972; Hadar et al, 1984a), among other functions. These communicative uses of head movement coexist with motoric consequences of speech production, like those to be discussed in this work. In a follow-on analysis, they found a significant positive correlation between head movement amplitude and peak speech loudness (Hadar et al, 1983a)
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