Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement
Abstract Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically-prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this...
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Nature Portfolio
2025-01-01
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84097-6 |
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| author | Karee Garvin Eliana Spradling Kathryn Franich |
| author_facet | Karee Garvin Eliana Spradling Kathryn Franich |
| author_sort | Karee Garvin |
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| description | Abstract Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically-prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this relationship? Here, we examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production. We provide novel evidence that words uttered with accompanying co-speech gestures are produced with more extreme tongue and jaw displacement, and that presence of a co-speech gesture contributes to greater temporal stability of oral articulatory movements. This effect–which we term coupling enhancement–differs from stress-based hyperarticulation in that differences in articulatory magnitude are not vowel-specific in their patterning. Speech and gesture synergies therefore constitute an independent variable to consider when modeling the effects of prosodic prominence on articulatory patterns. Our results are consistent with work in language acquisition and speech-motor control suggesting that synchronizing speech to gesture can entrain acoustic prominence. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-1244ae8bbaec42b9a2d44133666699c9 |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 2045-2322 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-01-01 |
| publisher | Nature Portfolio |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Scientific Reports |
| spelling | doaj-art-1244ae8bbaec42b9a2d44133666699c92025-01-05T12:21:47ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-01-0115111710.1038/s41598-024-84097-6Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancementKaree Garvin0Eliana Spradling1Kathryn Franich2Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard UniversityAbstract Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically-prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this relationship? Here, we examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production. We provide novel evidence that words uttered with accompanying co-speech gestures are produced with more extreme tongue and jaw displacement, and that presence of a co-speech gesture contributes to greater temporal stability of oral articulatory movements. This effect–which we term coupling enhancement–differs from stress-based hyperarticulation in that differences in articulatory magnitude are not vowel-specific in their patterning. Speech and gesture synergies therefore constitute an independent variable to consider when modeling the effects of prosodic prominence on articulatory patterns. Our results are consistent with work in language acquisition and speech-motor control suggesting that synchronizing speech to gesture can entrain acoustic prominence.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84097-6SpeechCo-speech gesturesArticulationProsodySpeech-motor coupling |
| spellingShingle | Karee Garvin Eliana Spradling Kathryn Franich Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement Scientific Reports Speech Co-speech gestures Articulation Prosody Speech-motor coupling |
| title | Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement |
| title_full | Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement |
| title_fullStr | Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement |
| title_full_unstemmed | Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement |
| title_short | Co-speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements: evidence for coupling-based enhancement |
| title_sort | co speech gestures influence the magnitude and stability of articulatory movements evidence for coupling based enhancement |
| topic | Speech Co-speech gestures Articulation Prosody Speech-motor coupling |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84097-6 |
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