GESPIN – GESTURE & SPEECH IN INTERACTION – Poznań, 24-26 September 2009
Gesture and speech prosody in relation to structural and affective dimensions of natural discourse Susan Duncan The University of Chicago, Psychology Department 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 USA deng@uchicago.edu
Abstract Language production makes use of speakers’ ability to shape, direct, and locate their hands and bodies in space and in relation to interlocutors and to objects in the immediate environment. This ability contributes to a cognitive and social-interactional function: the elaboration, via coverbal gesturing, of “material carriers” (McNeill & Duncan 2000) of linguistic conceptualizations. Here we examine the tight coordination of coverbal gesture and speech prosodic emphasis in natural interactive discourse. We consider the effect of factors in the communicative situation that expand versus constrict these dimensions of expression. Data from videotaped narrative discourses of healthy individuals and of individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (a neurodegenerative disorder affecting sensorimotor function, affect, and cognition) suggest the following: (i) speech prosody and coverbal gesture jointly highlight discourse focal information, (ii) variations in affect/emotion or, in general, of degree of ‘activation’/‘arousal’, during discourse, have an impact that spans the vocal-audible and manual-spatial dimensions of communication, suggesting that these are a unified dimension of communicative behavior. These observations are discussed as evidence in support of theories that hold language use to be a fundamentally embodied process.