Researchers involved: Frank Kügler, Alina Gregori, Pilar Prieto & Paula Ginesa Sánchez Ramón (MultIS), and Silva Ladewig (Processes of Stabilization in Gestures), and Federica Amici & Chiara Zulberti (Compositional Structures in Chimpanzee Gestural Communication), and Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Wim Pouw & Šárka Kadavá (FLESH)
Prominence is a central concept in linguistics as a structuring feature of language where certain elements stand out relative to other elements (e.g. Grice & Kügler 2021). Understanding how prominence is realized in multimodal communication is a key point for several projects of the ViCom priority program. While acoustic prominence has been extensively researched, with phonetic cues such as duration, fundamental frequency, intensity, and spectral balance shown to express prominence at word and phrase level (e.g. Wagner et al., 2015), the study of prominence in co-speech gesture (Momsen & Coulson submitted; Rohrer et al. 2023; Gregori, Sánchez-Ramón, Prieto & Kügler, submitted) and its interaction with breathing (Petrone, Fuchs & Koenig 2019, Fuchs, Koenig, Petrone 2017; Pouw & Fuchs, 2022) represents a relatively new direction. This research could be relevant not only for human but also for non-human animal communication (Demartsev et al., 2022). In the MultIS project, we are pursuing research to establish a perceptual measure of gestural prominence and to identify cues of gestural articulators such as the used space of gestures and the speech of certain articulators that contribute to gestural prominence. In the StabiGest project, gestural prominence gains significance within extended sequences of recurrent gestures. Examining gestural prominence in these contexts provides insights into higher-level prosodic units and the pragmatic aspects of meaning-making.
During the workshop, we plan to introduce an innovative research method — the use of thermal cameras. These cameras have the distinct advantage of allowing us to monitor motion, breathing (due to its sensitivity to temperature variations), and acoustics. If prominence is not only viewed as a linguistic structuring device but also as a bodily sensory expression, this technique may open up the possibility of detecting prominence at the levels of motion, breathing, and acoustics, given that these levels presumably are connected. Therefore, we would like to invite speakers who are engaged in research on gestural prominence as well as those who have experience with this innovative thermal camera technique, to discuss and assess its potential in exploring multimodal prominence.
From the perspective of animal communication, this initiative will mark a first step towards an understanding of prominence in animal vocalization and gesture.