SATURDAY
Nov. 2

8:30 - 9:00

Coffee / Registration

9:00 - 10:30

Session 3
Chair: Björn Köhnlein


10:30 - 10:45

Break

10:45 - 12:15

ABE - 4th Floor

12:15 - 13:15

Lunch

13:15 - 14:45

Session 4
Chair: Huteng Dai


14:45 - 15:00

Break

15:00 - 16:30

ABE - 4th Floor

16:30 - 16:45

Break

16:45 - 17:45

Plenary Session
Chair: Adam Jardine


Kathryn FRANICH
Harvard University


Co-Speech Gestures as a Window into Phonological Knowledge

Phonological description and analysis tend to draw heavily on a combination of speaker intuitions and acoustic-phonetic output from speech as evidence for grammatical patterns. Some phenomena, such as stress and metrical structure, tend to be difficult to assess based on these types of data alone: speaker intuitions about metrical prominence are often difficult to elicit, and phonetic correlates to stress are highly variable across languages and easily confused with cues to other prosodic events (de Lacy 2012; Roettger & Gordon 2017). In this talk, I discuss how co-speech gestures—movements of the hands, arms, head, etc. that are temporally coordinated to speech—can highlight patterns of prominence which may be difficult to assess based on acoustic patterns alone. I draw on data from two Niger-Congo languages (Medʉmba and Igbo) with quite different prosodic structures to demonstrate how gesture provides a unifying source of evidence of prominence across the two. For Medʉmba, gestures tend to cluster around the initial position of the stem, while for Igbo, competing constraints on the location of gestures suggest metrical organization at both the word level and the tonal level. I then briefly sketch some links between gesture and music as sister ‘coordinative practices’ in revealing patterns of metrical organization in language. Finally, I present preliminary cross-linguistic comparisons of gesture timing in Medʉmba and English (US and Cameroonian varieties) which suggest that gesture (and coordinative practices more broadly) may have a role to play in explaining typological variation in the phonetic manifestation of metrical prominence. 

19:00

Conference Dinner

Old Man Rafferty's