Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction

Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.
Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
prominence, there are three different configurations of
lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
well these landmarks align with each other, although these
differences did not reach significance.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2023

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