Gestures time to vowel onset and change the acoustics of the word in Mandarin

Abstract

Recent research on multimodal language production has revealed that prominence in speech and gesture go hand-in-hand. Specifically, peaks in gesture (i.e., the apex) seem to closely coordinate with peaks in fundamental frequency (F0). The nature of this relationship may also be bi-directional, as it has also been shown that the production of gesture directly affects speech acoustics. However, most studies on the topic have largely focused on stress-based languages, where fundamental frequency has a prominence-lending function. Less work has been carried out on lexical tone languages such as Mandarin, where F0 is lexically distinctive. In this study, four native Mandarin speakers were asked to produce single monosyllabic CV words, taken from minimal lexical tone triplets (e.g., /pi1/, /pi2/, /pi3/), either with or without a beat gesture. Our analyses of the timing of the gestures showed that the gesture apex most stably occurred near vowel onset, with consonantal duration being the strongest predictor of apex placement. Acoustic analyses revealed that words produced with gesture showed raised F0 contours, greater intensity, and shorter durations. These findings further our understanding of gesture-speech alignment in typologically diverse languages, and add to the discussion about multimodal prominence.

Type
Publication
In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, 866-870, doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-175
Patrick Louis Rohrer
Patrick Louis Rohrer
Postdoctoral Researcher

My main research interests lies in the relationship between gesture and prosody from a crosslinguistic perspective, and how these two modes jointly contribute to the conveyal of communicative meaning, as well as their effects on cognition and acquisition.

Hans Rutger Bosker
Hans Rutger Bosker
Assistant Professor

My research interests include speech perception, audiovisual integration, and prosody.