“This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before”: Initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures

Movement scientists have proposed to ground the relation between prosody and gesture in ‘vocal-entangled gestures’, defined as biomechanical linkages between upper limb movement and the respiratory-vocal system. Focusing on spoken language negation, this paper identifies an acoustic profile with which gesture is plausibly entangled, specifically linking the articulatory behavior of onset consonant lengthening with forelimb gesture preparation and facial deformation. This phenomenon was discovered in a video corpus of accented negative utterances from English language televised dialogues. Eight target examples were selected and examined using visualization software (ELAN and PRAAT) to analyse the correspondence of gesture phase structures (preparation, stroke, holds) with the negation word’s acoustic signal (duration, pitch, and intensity). The findings show that as syllable-onset consonant is lengthening (voiced alveolar /n/ = 300ms on average) with pitch and intensity increasing (e.g., “NNNNNNEVER”), the speaker’s humerus is rotating with palm pronating/adducing while his or her face is distorting. Different facial distortions, furthermore, were found to be entangled with different post-onset phonetic profiles (e.g., vowel rounding). These relations between prosodic and gestural phases have not yet appeared in studies of multimodal negation or gesture-speech biomechanics research. Bringing multimodal and entangled treatments of utterances into conversation has important implications for gesture studies.

© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press