Fri, March 6, 2026
3:55 pm - 5:15 pm
Oxley 103
Coupling enhancement: Effects of co-speech gesture on the magnitude and stability of oral gestures
Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this relationship? In this talk, I will examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production. I will provide novel evidence that words uttered with accompanying co-speech gestures are produced with more extreme displacement of the oral articulators, and that presence of a co-speech gesture contributes to greater temporal stability of oral articulatory movements. This effect–which I term coupling enhancement–differs from stress-based hyperarticulation in that differences in articulatory magnitude are not vowel-specific in their patterning. Speech and gesture synergies, therefore, constitute an independent variable to consider when modeling the effects of prosodic prominence on articulatory patterns.