Coverbal speech gestures signal phrase boundaries: A production study of Japanese and English infant- and adult-directed speech

Irene de La Cruz-Pavía (1) , Judit Gervain (1) , Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson (2) , Janet F. Werker (2)

1 INCC - UMR 8002 - Centre Neurosciences intégratives et Cognition
2 UBC Department of Linguistics

The acoustic realization of phrasal prominence is proposed to correlate with the order of V(erbs) and O(bjects) in natural languages. The present production study with 15 talkers of Japanese (OV) and English (VO) investigates whether the speech signal contains coverbal visual information that covaries with auditory prosody, in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech (IDS and ADS). Acoustic analysis revealed that phrasal prominence is carried by different acoustic cues in the two languages and speech styles, while analyses of motion showed that this acoustic prominence is not accompanied by coverbal gestures. Instead, the talkers of both languages produced eyebrow movements to mark the boundaries of target phrases within elicited utterances in combination with head nods. These results suggest that the signal might contain multimodal information to phrase boundaries, which could help listeners chunk phrases from the input.

Mots clés: word order; Infant Directed Speech; language acquisition; Optical Flow; co-verbal visual information; phrasal prosody

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie; Linguistique; Neurosciences; Psychologie

Irene de La Cruz-Pavía, Judit Gervain, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, Janet F. Werker. Coverbal speech gestures signal phrase boundaries: A production study of Japanese and English infant- and adult-directed speech. Language Acquisition, In press, ⟨10.1080/10489223.2019.1659276⟩. ⟨hal-02293465⟩