Reduction of gesticulation and information patterning strategies in acted speech

The research focused on the relationship between gesticulation (Kendon, 1980; McNeill, 2005) and speech prosody through the comparison between spontaneous and acted speech. The study relies on the adoption of theoretical frameworks which are suitable for data comparison, i.e., the Language into Act Theory - L-AcT (Cresti, 2000; Moneglia & Raso, 2014), in which prosodic cues are considered for their correlation with information structure; and Kita, van Gijn & van der Hulst (1998) for gesticulation. The study aims to define better the linguistic correlation between speech and gesture structures and highlight cognitive implications emerging from differences between the two varieties and the two modalities. Along with the qualitative results, we present a perception-based system of annotation, whose layout is mainly based on LASG (Bressem, Ladewig & Müller, 2013), where the gestural level and the prosodic level are analyzed as two continuous overlapping streamings parsed into perceptible relevant units. Both gesture annotation and linguistic annotation have been validated. As a general result, we have evidence of several reductions of both linguistic and gestural patterning strategies in acted speech instead of spontaneous speech. Utterances show poor informational organization in acted speech while, for the gesture, Gesture units and Gesture phrases tend to coincide. Both reductions call for a link between the ideational process, the Information structure, and the gesture during the spontaneous performance that falls into acted speech.