Temporal alignment between head gesture and prosodic prominence in naturally occurring conversation: An electromagnetic articulometry study

Abstract

Studies of the relationship between speech events and gesticulation have suggested that the peak of the prosodic pitch accent serves as a target with which body gestures may be coordinated (Roth, 2002; Loehr, 2004). While previous work has relied on controlled speech elicitation generally restricted to nonrepresentational extension/retraction (Leonard and Cummins, 2011) or iconic (Kelly et al., 2008) gestures, here we examine the kinematics of the speech articulators and associated head movements from pairs of individuals engaged in spontaneous conversation. Age and gender matched native speakers of American English seated 2 m apart were recorded using two electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) devices (Tiede and Mooshammer, 2013). Head movements were characterized by the centroid of reference sensors placed on the left and right mastoid processes and the upper incisors. Pitch accents were coded following the ToBI implementation of Pierrehumbert's intonational framework following Beckman and Elam (1997). Preliminary findings show that the apex (point of maximum excursion) of head movements within an IP in general precedes the peak of the associated pitch accent, and is consistently aligned with co-occurring articulatory events within the syllable. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD-DC-012350.]