ABSTRACT
This research focuses on the relationship between gesticulation (Kendon, 1988; McNeill, 2005) and speech prosody, through the comparison between spontaneous and acted speech. The study relies on the adoption of theoretical frameworks that are suitable for data comparison, specifically the Language into Act Theory (Cresti, 2000; Moneglia & Raso, 2014), in which prosodic cues are considered for their correlation with information structure, and Kita and others (1998) for gesticulation. The aim of the study is to better define the correlation between speech and gesture structures, as well as to highlight cognitive implications emerging from differences in the two varieties and in the two modalities. Along with the qualitative results, we present a perception-based system of annotation, whose layout is mostly based on LASG (Linguistic Annotation System for Gestures: Bressem et al., 2013).
We have evidence of several reductions of both linguistic and gestural patterning strategies in acted speech. Utterances show poor informational organisation while, for gesture, gesture units and gesture phrases tend to coincide. Both reductions call for a link between the ideational process, the information structure, and the gesticulation during spontaneous performance that falls in acted speech.
