Based on a video recording of conversational British English, this paper tests whether several different subordinate syntactic structures are evenly vocally integrated to their environment. "Secondary constructions" have been described in linguistics as dependent, subordinate forms elaborating on primary elements of discourse. Although their verbal and vocal characteristics have been deeply analysed, few studies have provided a qualified picture of their vocal integration. Beyond showing that secondary constructions are not evenly dependent on their environment, the results suggest that prosody demarcates secondary constructions more than it integrates them. The creation of a break preferentially takes place retrospectively, immediately after the subordinate structure through rhythmic features and/or pitch upsteps.

Non-fluent aphasia is characterized by frequent word search and a much slower speech rate than non-aphasic speech. For patients with this type of aphasia, communication with those around them is therefore made difficult and is often severely impaired. One of the therapeutic proposals to improve the quality of life of these patients is to re-educate them with more multimodal alternatives. This of course assumes that gestures represent possible alternative means of communication for patients, and that their gestures are not affected in the same way as their speech. This article therefore proposes to study the gestures of 4 aphasic people and to compare them to the gestures performed by non-aphasic people, but also to establish correspondences between those gestures, intonation contours and the way people with aphasia develop their discourse. Results show that although gesture rate is not different in the two groups of participants, the gesture-to-speech ratio is higher for people with aphasia (PWA) than for non-aphasic people (NAP). Considering the fact that PWA also gesture more than NAP during silent pauses, which are longer but not more frequent than in NAP’s speech, and the fact that their gestures coincide less often with a lexical word, we believe that PWA use their gestures as compensation strategies for deficient speech. Yet, their speech impairment is also reflected in their gesturing: more gestures are prepared but abandoned before the stroke in this group and pre-stroke holds are longer, which means that PWA hold their gestures in the hope that they will better coincide with the word they are supposed to accompany and which takes more time to be uttered than in non-pathological speech. Their gestures are also less linked to each other than in the NAP group which goes hand in hand with the fact that they tend to utter independent syntactic phrases with no cohesive marker between them. This is also reflected in their less frequent use of flat and rising tones in intonation, which generally indicate that two sentence parts are dependent one upon the other, as well as their less frequent use of gestures showing discourse organization. In terms of gesture types, the PWA in this study perform many rhythmic beats and rely much on conventional gestures to compensate for their speech impairment rather than on their own creativity. Globally, this means that if multimodal therapies may benefit PWA to improve their communication with other people, speech therapists nevertheless need to be aware that life-long habits of gesture-speech alignment and synchronization may not be so easy to overcome for patients.

This study proposes an analysis of some pragmatic gestures with three types of open-palm gestures: beats and two instances of the hand flip, elsewhere called the ‘palm-up open-hand’ gesture (Müller, 2004; Cienki & Müller, 2008). Drawing upon three different corpora (political speeches made at the European Parliament, a television show in which the role of this parliament is presented and a corpus of conversational speech recorded in a lab), it proposes an analysis into prosodic, discursive and modal gestures. The paper - through the discussion of particular examples - will address the issues of the type of prosodic and discourse units which are marked by these gestures. Using the same methodological framework, the type of grammatical modality conveyed by open-palm gestures will also be considered.

International audienceThis study aims at examining the links between marked structures in the syntactic and prosodic domains (fronting and focal accent), and the way the two types of contrast can be reinforced by gestures. It was conducted on a corpus of 1h30 of spoken French, involving three pairs of speakers in dialogues. Results show that although the tendency is for marked constructions both in syntax and prosody not to be reinforced by gestures, there is still a higher proportion of gesture reinforcing with prosodic marking than with syntactic fronting. The paper describes which eyebrow and head movements as well as hand gestures are more liable to accompany the two operations. Beyond these findings, the study gives an insight into the current models proposed in the literature for gesture-speech production

Abstract. The paper presents a project aiming at collecting, annotating and exploiting a dialogue corpus from a multimodal perspective. The goal of the project is the description of the different parameters involved in a natural interaction process. Describing such complex mechanism requires corpora annotated in different domains. This paper first presents the corpus and the scheme used in order to annotate the different domains that have to be taken into consideration, namely phonetics, morphology, syntax, prosody, discourse and gestures. Several examples illustrating the interest of such a resource are then proposed.