Gesture and Speech Coordination: The Influence of the Relationship Between Manual Gesture and Speech

Communication is multimodal. In particular, speech is often accompanied by manual gestures. Moreover, their coordination has often been related to prosody. The aim of this study was to further explore the coordination between prosodic focus and different manual gestures (pointing, beat and control gestures) on ten speakers using motion capture. As compared to previous studies, results show that the coordination between gestures and speech is modulated by the relationship between themanual gesture and speech, especially for the pointing gesture. Moreover, this study shows that different strategies might be adopted so as to adapt to the changes in this relationship.