Garvin Karee, Spradling Eliana, Franich Kathryn
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 2;15(1):157. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-84097-6.
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? Here, we examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production. We provide novel evidence that words uttered with accompanying co-speech gestures are produced with more extreme tongue and jaw displacement, and that presence of a co-speech gesture contributes to greater temporal stability of oral articulatory movements. This effect-which we 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. Our results are consistent with work in language acquisition and speech-motor control suggesting that synchronizing speech to gesture can entrain acoustic prominence.
人类说话时很少不做出手部、头部及身体其他部位的伴随言语手势。伴随言语手势在与言语的时间配合上也受到高度限制，通常与韵律突出的音节同步。这种关系背后的功能原理是什么？在这里，我们研究伴随言语的手动手势的产生如何影响言语产生过程中口腔发音器官的时空模式。我们提供了新的证据，表明伴随着伴随言语手势说出的单词，其舌头和下颚的位移更为极端，并且伴随言语手势的存在有助于提高口腔发音动作的时间稳定性。我们将这种效应称为耦合增强，它与基于重音的过度发音不同，因为发音幅度的差异在其模式上并非特定于元音。因此，在模拟韵律突出对发音模式的影响时，言语和手势协同作用构成了一个需要考虑的独立变量。我们的结果与语言习得和言语运动控制方面的研究一致，表明将言语与手势同步可以带来声学上的突出。
