We are happy to announce a talk by Camila Antônio Barros (Berlin) and Vinicius Macuch-Silva (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: October 23, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Time commitment: ways gesture can be placed in time
Abstract:
In this talk, we discuss different types of synchrony between gesture and speech, an issue that has been at the center of work on gesture-speech coordination. Based on McNeill (1992), we present an empirical investigation of how gesture and speech can be synchronized at the phonological, semantic, and pragmatic levels, drawing on a corpus study as well as on an experimental study. In the corpus study, we investigate the overlap between gesture and speech in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, looking at representationality and the synchrony of gesture relative to phonological anchors. The results show that the overlap between a word and a stroke is not a reliable metric to understand association when controlling for the investigated variables. In the experimental study, we test how a coarse overlap between gesture and speech impact the perception of speaker commitment in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. More specifically, we investigate how precision gestures modulate speaker commitment in contrastive utterances with different intonational contours. The results show an effect of gesture on the perception of speaker commitment, with diverging results for each language. Overall, we argue that gesture works in tandem with prosodic cues even in the absence of fine grained timing, impacting the understanding of gestural synchrony and its implications to alignment.