The interaction of pitch accent and gesture production in Italian and English

Abstract

This article addresses the way that gesture and speech prominence are manifest in two different linguistic communities – Italian and American English. Controlled and free narratives were elicited from three adult American females (Midwestern variety) and three adult Italian females (Florentine variety) and analyzed using a method designed to measure the properties associated with pitch accents, those of gestures, and the alignment of the two together in naturally occurring speech. The results suggest some important similarities as well as some differences between American and Italian speak ers. In cases where the pitch accent is not totally contained within the domain of the gesture, both groups tended to produce gestures that preceded the onset of the pitch accent, confirming previous work. Both groups overwhelmingly also used manual gestures of the hands for iconic gestures. There was a difference in the expression of prosodic gestures: while both American and Italian groups produced a greater number of prosodic gestures with the hands than the body, the Italians exhibited a stronger preference to do so. The vowels of the English speakers were also more affected by the presence of a gesture than those of the Italian speakers. The trends found in the results of this study suggest that there may be cross-linguistic differences in the properties and alignment of gestures, but larger groups of participants will be needed to conclude this with certainty, since there was a high degree of between-subject variation. In both Ital ian and US English, these data provide evidence for the existence of one, multi-modal system involving speech and co-speech gestures that constitutes an integrated prosodic system of a language.