Beyond vocal tract actions: speech prosody and co-verbal gesturing in face-to-face communication

Authors: Bernd J. Kröger, Peter Birkholz, Emily Kaufmann, Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube

Abstract:

A comprehensive approach for describing the functional and behavioral aspects of communicative actions, e.g. facial, manual, and vocal tract actions, has been established for face-to-face-communication (Cogn Process 11:187-205, 2010). Within the speech domain, this approach will now be extended in two ways: (i) by introducing level actions such as turn, breath group, phrase, stress group, syllable, and sound group level actions, and (ii) by distinguishing between prosodic and segmental speech actions such as respiratory, voice quality, tonal, and vocal tract actions. Moreover this paper describes how speech actions are temporally coordinated with co-verbal (or co-speech) communicative actions such as manual and facial actions. Index Terms: face-to-face communication; communicative action; speech; prosody; vocal tract action; co-verbal action