Purpose: This study aims to analyze the development of gesture-speech temporal alignment patterns in children's narrative speech from a longitudinal perspective and, specifically, the potential differences between different gesture types, namely, gestures that imagistically portray or refer to semantic content in speech (i.e., referential…

Purpose: Previous studies have investigated the effects of the inability to produce hand gestures on speakers' prosodic features of speech; however, the potential effects of encouraging speakers to gesture have received less attention, especially in naturalistic settings. This study aims at investigating the effects of encouraging the production…

Purpose: Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the…

This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children--nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking--between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to…

Recent research has shown that beat gestures (hand gestures that co-occur with speech in spontaneous discourse) are temporally integrated with prosodic prominence and that they help word memorization and discourse comprehension. However, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of beat gestures in second language (L2) pronunciation…