Description

A growing body of psycholinguistic research shows that listeners infer contextual alternatives (e.g., door) to an element (e.g., window) in a sentence when it carries contrastive prosodic prominence (e.g., The salesman closed the window), even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. In this presentation, Mengzhu Yan reports on a cross-modal priming experiment to test this in Mandarin.

The exact nature of timing relations between speech and gesture has not yet been fully uncovered. It is known that manual gestures co-occur with semantically most related speech components. A number of studies also linked gesture to prosody focusing on the temporal coordination between smallest prominent events (pitch accents vs. apexes). Olcay Turk extends these investigations of coordination between prosody and gesture to phrasal levels and also suggests information structure as another modality regulating the temporal coordination.