Co-production of contrastive prosodic focus and manual gestures: Temporal coordination and effects on the acoustic and articulatory correlates of focus

Abstract

Speech, and prosody in particular, is tightly linked to manual gestures. This study investigates the coordination of prosodic contrastive focus and different manual gestures (pointing, beat and control gestures). We used motion capture on ten speakers to explore this issue. The results show that prosodic focus "attracts" the manual gesture whichever its type, the temporal alignment being stricter for pointing and mainly realized between the apex of the pointing gesture and articulatory vocalic targets. Moreover, it appears that the production of a gesture, whichever its type, does not affect the acoustic and articulatory correlates of prosodic focus.