Prosodic structure shapes the temporal realization of intonation and manual gesture movements

Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the gesture apex is anchored in the intonation peak and (b) the upcoming prosodic boundary influences the timing of gesture and intonation movements.

Fifteen Catalan speakers pointed at a screen while pronouncing a target word with different metrical patterns in a contrastive focus condition and followed by a phrase boundary. A total of 702 co-speech deictic gestures were acoustically and gesturally analyzed.

Intonation peaks and gesture apexes showed parallel behavior with respect to their position within the accented syllable: They occurred at the end of the accented syllable in non-phrase-final position, whereas they occurred well before the end of the accented syllable in phrase-final position. Crucially, the position of intonation peaks and gesture apexes was correlated and was bound by prosodic structure.

The results refine the phonological synchronization rule (McNeill, 1992), showing that gesture apexes are anchored in intonation peaks and that gesture and prosodic movements are bound by prosodic phrasing.