*Thanks for visiting my talk! Below you will find the abstract, and further down the links to download the presentation as well as the slides in PDF format. Feel free to interact through the comments! I have also made myself available for live Q&A Session Friday, April 17th from 17h to 18h. I will post the link to a Jitsi meeting here 15 minutes before beginning. Further availability to meet virtually on the 15th, 16, or 20th of April (14h-19h) **by request**.*
JITSI: https://meet.jit.si/GLOWorkshop1BeatGesturesQA
**Beat gestures and prosodic phrasing in French**
Patrick Louis Rohrer 1,2 , Pilar Prieto 2,3 & Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie 1
1 LLING-UMR 6310, Université de Nantes, France\
2 DTCL, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia\
3 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Catalonia
Previous studies have concluded that co-speech gestures are produced in a temporally coordinated way with prosodic prominence (Kendon, 1980; McNeill, 1992). More granularly, some studies have found that strokes and particularly apexes are coordinated with pitch accentuation (Jannedy & Mendoza-Denton, 2005; Loehr, 2012; Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2013, among others). Further, it is often said that beat gestures (McNeill, 1992) tend to be tightly coupled with prosody and rhythmic marking. However, few studies have specifically looked at the relationship between beat gestures and prosodic prominence, mostly with mixed results. McClave (1994) found while some beat gestures co-occur with nuclear pitch accents, many do not. Instead she proposes a rhythmic spacing between subsequent beat gestures. A more recent study by Shattuck-Hufnagel & Ren (2018) found that pitch-accented syllables and the strokes of beat gestures co-occurred at a rate of 83.1% in a 20-minute speech sample.
However, these two studies have investigated English, and the other previously-mentioned studies have explored languages where pitch accentuation tends to have a prominence-lending function. No studies have investigated French, where a main function of pitch accentuation is to mark prosodic boundaries. Indeed, the smallest prosodic phrase in French consists of an obligatory, phrase-final pitch accent (henceforth FA) and an optional initial accent (henceforth IA) that is said to mark the left edge of the prosodic phrase (e.g., Welby, 2006). Specifically we ask if beat gestures are indeed tightly coupled with pitch accentuation in French, where pitch accents are mainly demarcative in function. We also explore if the beat gestures that are not associated with pitch accentuation may be marking prosodic phrasing.
A corpus analysis of Ted Talks is being carried out. This represents an academic-style speech which has been shown to generally contain a higher rate of non-referential gesture production (e.g.., Shattuck-Hufnagel & Ren, 2018). Videos from TedX-sponsored events were downloaded and encoded for gesture annotation in ELAN (29.97 FPS; Wittenburg et al., 2009, see https://tla.mpi.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Video_encoding_guidelines_ELAN.pdf). The audio files were extracted (48 kHz) and prosody was separately annotated in
PRAAT following French_ToBI standards (Boersma, 2001; Delais-Roussarie et al, 2015). Preliminary results show that beat gesture apexes co-occur with pitch accented syllables at rates much lower than previously observed.
Closer analysis seems to suggest that those beat gestures that do not co-occur with pitch-accented syllables may be serving a demarcative function for the left edge of the prosodic phrase, as their distribution across the phrase does not significantly differ from that of the initial accent. These early findings suggest that the co-occurrence of beat gestures and prosodic prominence may vary across languages and that these gestures may be related to other aspects of prosody -- not only in prominence, but in phrasing.
**Selected References**
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5(9/10), 341-345.
Delais-Roussarie, E., Post, B., Avanzi, M., Buthke, C., Di Cristo, A., Feldhausen, I., ... Yoo, H.-Y. (2015).
Intonational phonology of French: Developing a ToBI system for French. In S. Frota & P. Prieto
(Eds.), Intonation in Romance (pp. 63–100). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Esteve-Gibert, N., Prieto, P. (2013). Prosodic structure shapes the temporal realization of intonation and manual
gesture movements. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56(3), 850-864.
Jannedy, S., Mendoza-Denton, N. 2005. Structuring information through gesture and intonation.
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure, 3, 199–244.
Kendon, A. (1980). Gesticulation and speech: Two aspects of the process of utterance. In: Key, M.R. (Ed.), The
Relationship of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (pp. 202-227). The Hague: Mouton.
Loehr, D. (2012). Temporal, structural, and pragmatic synchrony between intonation and gesture. Laboratory
Phonology, 3(1), 71-89.
McClave, E. (1994). Gestural beats: The rhythm hypothesis. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 23(1), 45-66.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Shattuck-Hufnagel S and Ren A. (2018). The Prosodic Characteristics of Non-referential Co-speech Gestures in
a Sample of Academic-Lecture-Style Speech. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1514.
Welby, P. 2006. French intonational structure: Evidence from tonal alignment. Journal of Phonetics, 34(3), 343-371.
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., and Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: a Professional
Framework for Multimodality Research, Proceedings of LREC 2006.
