Volume 3, Issue 1 - Gesture As Language, Gesture and Language 2

Sequencing errors in natural and elicited speech have long been used to inform models of phonological encoding and to understand the process by which serial ordering is achieved in speech. The present study focused on the distribution of sequential speech errors within multi-word prosodic units to determine whether such units are relevant to speech planning, and, if so, how. Forty native English-speaking undergraduate students were asked to produce sentences that varied in length and in the extent to which certain phonological features were repeated (tongue twisters or not). Participants prepared their utterances in advance of speaking and were coached to be as fluent as possible once they started speaking. The goal was to ensure the production of well-structured utterances, while maximizing the number of errors produced, and minimizing the effects that excessive self-correction might have on prosodic structure. Speech errors were perceptually identified in the recorded speech and categorized. Strong and weak prosodic boundaries were prosodically transcribed in sentences with sequencing errors. Speech error patterns were found to correspond well with the boundaries of the multi-word prosodic units defined by the strong and weak prosodic boundaries. In particular, the number of sequencing errors was found to vary as a function of position within a unit such that the fewest errors were found in initial position, more occurred in early-mid position, and even more occurred in late-mid position. This pattern of increasing errors across the multi-word prosodic unit was referred to as the cumulative error pattern. The analyses also revealed a final position effect. When multi-word prosodic units occurred in utterance-initial or utterance-medial position, a disproportionate number of errors occurred in the final position of the unit. However, when the units occurred in utterance-final position, more errors occurred in late-mid position than in final position. The cumulative error pattern and final position effect are interpreted to suggest the serial activation and decay in activation of multi-word planning domains during phonological encoding.

This project explores three classes of human action through an investigation of long-distance coarticulation, defined here as the articulatory influence of one phonetic element (e.g., consonant or vowel) on another across more than one intervening element. Our first experiment investigated anticipatory vowel-to-vowel (VV) coarticulation in English. The second experiment was patterned after the first but deals instead with anticipatory location-to-location (LL) effects in American Sign Language (ASL). The sign experiment also incorporated a non-linguistic manual action, permitting a comparison of effects not only between spoken and signed language, but also between linguistic and non-linguistic manual actions. For the spoken-language study, sentences were created in which multiple consecutive schwas (target vowels) were followed by various context vowels. Eighteen English speakers were recorded as they repeated each sentence six times, and statistical tests were performed to determine the extent to which target vowel formant frequencies were influenced differently by different context vowels. For some speakers, significant effects of one vowel on another were found across as many as five intervening segments. In the sign study, motion-capture technology was used to investigate LL coarticulation in the signing of five ASL users. Some evidence was found of significant LL coarticulatory influence of one sign on another across as many as three intervening signs. However, LL effects overall were weaker and less pervasive than the VV effects found in the spoken-language study. The outcomes in the sign study's linguistic and non-linguistic conditions did not substantially differ. Collectively, these results support and complement previous research which has found that in comparisons of linguistic and non-linguistic manual and oral actions, movement patterns associated with oral and manual actions differ appreciably, while the linguistic vs. non-linguistic distinction appears to show little or no influence.

This paper explores the interaction between intonation and gesture, noting temporal, structural, and pragmatic synchrony. Videotapes of subjects conversing freely were annotated for intonation according to ToBI (Beckman and Elam 1997), and for gesture according to Kendon (1980) and McNeill (1992). The time-stamped annotations were analyzed statistically, as well as visually in the Anvil tool (Kipp 2001), which allows time-aligned viewing of videos with their annotations. Alignments were investigated between three levels of intonational units and four levels of gestural units. The intonational units were, from smallest to largest, pitch accents, intermediate phrases, and intonational phrases. The gestural units, again from smallest to largest, were apices of strokes, gesture phases, gesture phrases, and gesture units. Of these possible combinations, two pairs aligned. Apices clearly aligned with pitch accents, and gesture phrases tended to align with intermediate phrases. The existence of intermediate phrases in English has been the subject of some debate (Ladd 2008), and this paper suggests that a probable gestural correlate to intermediate phrases provides independent evidence for their existence. In addition, intonation and gesture were found to perform simultaneous complementary pragmatic functions. This temporal, structural, and pragmatic synchrony between the two channels reinforces the claim that speech and gesture are two surface forms of the same underlying and emerging cognitive content.

The ability, or lack thereof, of 14-month-old infants to associate novel, minimal pair word-forms with novel objects in a variety of experimental settings has been a crucial research window into how infants go about the quintessential linguistic task of learning words. Here we ask whether the presence of a human interactor in the experimental setting facilitates minimal pair word-object association at this age. In addition to standard looking time measures to test this question, we also introduce the use of measures of infant movement derived by the application of an efficient algorithm that measures motion from 2D video. Infant gaze patterns across the experimental session identified two groups of infants, those engaging in more and those engaging in less mutual gaze with the Experimenter; both groups demonstrated success in the task by both looking time and movement measures. Infants did not succeed in the task by either measure when a videotaped Experimenter presented the labels. We suggest that infants at this age are in transition from being good “information consumers” to becoming good “information seekers,” and that the presence of the live Experimenter plays a crucial role in making it possible for infants to demonstrate their nascent word learning abilities. Further, we explore insights into the looking time results provided by the movement measures as well as novel contributions to our understanding of language acquisition afforded by the examination of infant movement.

The present study investigates the acoustic differentiation of three coronal stops in the indigenous Australian language Wubuy. We test independent claims that only VC (vowel-into-consonant) transitions provide robust acoustic cues for retroflex as compared to alveolar and dental coronal stops, with no differentiating cues among these three coronal stops evident in CV (consonant-into-vowel) transitions. The four-way stop distinction /t, t̪, ʈ, c/ in Wubuy is contrastive word-initially (Heath 1984) and by implication utterance-initially, i.e., in CV-only contexts, which suggests that acoustic differentiation should be expected to occur in the CV transitions of this language, including in initial positions. Therefore, we examined both VC and CV formant transition information in the three target coronal stops across VCV (word-internal), V#CV (word-initial but utterance-medial) and ##CV (word- and utterance-initial), for /а/ vowel contexts, which provide the optimal environment for investigating formant transitions. Results confirm that these coronal contrasts are maintained in the CVs in this vowel context, and in all three positions. The patterns of acoustic differences across the three syllable contexts also provide some support for a systematic role of prosodic boundaries in influencing the degree of coronal stop differentiation evident in the vowel formant transitions.

Acoustic and video evidence suggest that Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language, contains Rounding Assimilation, rounding of schwa before a stressed rounded vowel across uvular or laryngeal consonants. Although Rounding Assimilation has received no mention in previous Deg Xinag studies, it appears to be at stage II, phonologization, in the model of sound change proposed by Hyman (1976). Data from the related language Babine-Witsuwit'en is also presented, showing an absence of Rounding Assimilation in one of the contexts where it occurs in Deg Xinag. Babine-Witsuwit'en sheds light on how and why Rounding Assimilation may have developed historically in Deg Xinag.

Using the framework of Articulatory Phonology, we offer a phonological account of the allophonic variation undergone by the velar fricative phoneme in Navajo, a Southern or Apachean Athabaskan language spoken in Arizona and New Mexico. The Navajo velar fricative strongly co-articulates with the following vowel, varying in both place and manner of articulation. The variation in this velar fricative seems greater than the variation of velars in many well-studied languages. The coronal central fricatives in the inventory, in contrast, are quite phonetically stable. The back fricative of Navajo thus highlights 1) the linguistic use of an extreme form of coarticulation and 2) the mechanism by which languages can control coarticulation. It is argued that the task dynamic model underlying Articulatory Phonology, with the mechanism of gestural blending controlling coarticulation, can account for the multiplicity of linguistically-controlled ways in which velars coarticulate with surrounding vowels without requiring any changes of input specification due to context. The ability of phonological and morphological constraints to restrict the amount of coarticulation argues against strict separation of phonetics and phonology.