📆 dimarts 26 de setembre del 2023

🕚 11:00 h

📌 aula 52.737- 7a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF

Resum: In the symphony of human communication, gestures and speech create a harmonious melody. Much like an orchestra that coordinates its movements to strike focal points in a symphony, gestures and speech in language production converge at prominent moments of expression. In the end, both originate from the same instrument: the human body. In this presentation, I delve into this intricate interplay, using Polish counting-out rhymes as a unique linguistic context.
I will present two recent studies, the first of which focused on gesture-speech physics (Kadavá et al., 2023, ICPhS). Our analysis reveals that rhythmic pointing gestures robustly influence speech acoustics. This finding underscores the interconnectedness of gesture and speech within the body. In the second study, we explored the flexibility of stress production in Polish, a language with typically fixed stress patterns (Ćwiek et al., 2023, GESPIN). Here, the findings show that prominence marking in the rhythmic pointing task is flexible, suggesting that prominence adjusts to rhythmic gestures. This study not only highlights the malleability of linguistic prosody in a fixed-stress language but also uncovers the intricate relationship between gestures and speech, where gestures can both enhance and challenge established prosodic rules.
Together, these studies illuminate the symbiotic relationship between gestures and prosody in language production, providing a deeper understanding of how gestures not only complement but also influence the fundamental aspects of speech.