Kinematic analysis of negation’s vocal-entangled gestures: Acoustic and kinesic dynamics at onset consonant of NEVER

‘Vocal-entangled gestures’ arise from the fleshy biomechanics of bodily coupled systems (Pouw & Fuchs, 2022). Inferring vocal-entangled gestures within utterances characterised by multimodal negation (Harrison, 2024), this study explored the extent to which gesture kinematics are correlated with prosodic prominence at onset consonant of negation particles. Identified in a corpus of media discourse, the initial target data were utterances involving ‘lateral sweep’ (Calbris, 2011) with saliently lengthened onset of negation particle NEVER (average 300 msec; Niebuhr, 2010). ELAN and PRAAT were used to identify and visualise correspondence between kinesic (gesture phase) and acoustic dynamics (duration, pitch, and intensity), then mediapipe output from speaker’s index finger was used to plot the velocity, speed, acceleration, and jerk of gesture (Owoyele et al., 2022). This paper shows the dependence we found between gesture acceleration and prosodic prominence, discussing potential support for the ‘gesture–speech biomechanics thesis’ (Pouw & Fuchs, 2022).

References
Calbris, G. (2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Harrison, S. (2024). ‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures. Language and Cognition, 1–34. doi:10.1017/langcog.2024.26
Niebuhr, O. (2010). On the phonetics of intensifying emphasis in German. Phonetica, 67: 170–198.
Pouw, W., & Fuchs, S. (2022). Origins of vocal-entangled gesture. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 141, 104836
Owoyele, B., Trujillo, J., De Melo, G., Pouw, W. (2022). Masked-Piper: Masking personal identities in visual recordings while preserving multimodal information. SoftwareX. doi: 10.1016/j.softx.2022.101236.