Abstract
In this paper, we explore the role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of statements and questions in two varieties of European Portuguese—the standard (SEP) and the insular variety of Azores, Ponta Delgada (PtD)—previously shown to convey sentence type contrasts by different uses of intonational means and/or facial gestures, namely eyebrow movements. Forty native speakers (20 from each variety) were exposed to SEP and PtD stimuli in a perception task with three conditions (audio only, video only, and audiovisual). The audiovisual condition includes congruent and incongruent (both original and manipulated) stimuli, where there is either a match or a mismatch between the auditory and visual features as potential cues for a specific sentence type. We concluded that both SEP and PtD participants rely more on intonation than on eyebrow movement to identify sentence types, even when exposed to incongruent audiovisual stimuli. In the absence of audio information, unexpectedly, participants do not interpret eyebrow raising as a question marker, not even when perceiving stimuli from their native variety. When exposed to non-native audiovisual stimuli, both SEP and PtD participants present longer reaction times (RTs), especially for incongruent stimuli. Finally, although we confirm the strength of intonation over visual cues, RTs in the audiovisual condition are significantly shorter than in the audio condition, thus pointing to the relevance of visual cues for structural/linguistic marking.
Highlights
The relation between gestures and speech has been modeled in a variety of ways
We explore the role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of statements and questions in two varieties of European Portuguese—the standard (SEP) and the insular variety of Azores, Ponta Delgada (PtD)—previously shown to convey sentence type contrasts by different uses of intonational means and/or facial gestures, namely eyebrow movements
We explore the role of intonation and facial gestures in the perception of sentence types across two European Portuguese (EP) varieties
Summary
The relation between gestures and speech has been modeled in a variety of ways. Some studies point to the hand-in-hand hypothesis (So et al, 2009; de Ruiter et al, 2012), assuming that gestures are redundant in the sense that they basically express information that can reliably be derived from the verbal content alone. Other studies propose an alternative hypothesis, based on the assumption of a trade-off relation between gestures and speech production, i.e., speech and gestures complement each other (Bangerter, 2004; Melinger & Levelt, 2004). These two hypotheses have been explored with different goals (ontogenetic, the role of gestures in social interaction, modeling, inter alia), providing an important contribution to the knowledge of different (non-)linguistic areas, prosody included. The interaction between verbal prosody and visual prosody has been studied in order to understand whether these two modalities are parallel or complement each other. Within the most analyzed visual cues (eyebrows, head movements, and pointing gestures), and alongside pitch accents in the auditory
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