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Prosodic and gestural marking of focus types in Catalan and German

Authors:
Gregori, A., Sánchez-Ramón, P. G., Prieto, P., Kügler, F.

Year / Status:
2024

Journal / Venue:
Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, 891-895

DOI / URL:
10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-180

Abstract

Prosody and gesture coordinate with each other in speech. This study investigates the contribution of prosody and gesture to the marking of focus types comparing Catalan and German. We hypothesize that multimodal prominence increases along increasing layers of pragmatic meaning in focus, namely background (no focus) < information < contrastive < corrective. To test this, we conducted a semi-spontaneous production experiment in Catalan and German, that systematically varied eliciting contexts for each focus type, in which participants (n per language = 15) interacted with a digital character. Target focused adjectives (791 items) were annotated for pitch accentuation and gesture presence, as well as degrees of perceived prosodic and gestural prominence. Results suggest that while target adjectives are systematically produced with pitch accentuation across focus types in both languages, the number of head gestures tends to significantly increase with focus pragmatic strength in both languages. Crucially, a significant positive correlation was found between focus types and degrees of perceived prosodic and gestural prominence in both languages. In short, an increasing multimodal marking was observed across focus types, in terms of number of gestures produced and perceived prosodic and gestural prominence, which indicates an integrated behavior of prosody and gesture in speech.