Gestural Beats: The Rhythm Hypothesis Evelyn McClave

Gestures - Iconics. These gestures refer to a very direct formal relationship between the gesture and meaning. Example: making the shape of a ball when talking about a ball. - Metaphorics. The gesture presents an image of an abstraction, a "concrete metaphor for a concept“. -Deictics. Pointing, which can reference a specific object or event, but often reference more a "location" in gesture- space where a specific idea or concept resides.

Beats The hand moving in rhythmic relationship to speech. Beats were thought to accent or emphasize portions of cooccurring speech.

Beats Beats visually mark a vocal rhythm evident in speech  Speech is primary and the gestural rhythm is more or less identical to the vocal rhythm Beats are rhythmically patterned by themselves  this pattern is not dependent on speech but meshes with speech at specific places to push the speech rhythm forward

Identifying Tone Units Pause a) but they´re all (pause) big _... °_ b)Ya know fat like ya know uh (pause) hairy.. °.... °_

Identifying Tone Units Pitch movement and it said now judge what you would do in.... °..... this case as a lawyer (pause).... °._ ___

Identifying Tone Units anacrusis: unstressed syllables at the beginning of an intonation group which are often spoken much faster than unstressed syllables later in the segment  indicates the start of a new tone unit

Identifying Tone Units Lengthening of a syllable  often used to determine the end of a tone unit

Identifying Tone Units change in register  signals a new tone unit

Gestural Rhythm. we were #1 of- # , , ,12, , ,20. TU TD NC TU TD NC.... -fer- ing her #3 the sing- #4 -gle ,25, , , , TU NC TD TU TD

Summary 1. Beats occur on both stressed and unstressed syllables and during pauses 2. Beats are often organized in rhythmic patterns 3. If a beat coincides with the tone-unit nucleus, the downbeat rather than the upbeat will cooccur 4. When a beat cooccurs with a stressed monosyllabic word other than the tone-unit nucleus, either the upbeat or the downbeat may coincide with the word. 5. When a beat cooccurs with a multisyllabic word, a downbeat usually cooccurs with the syllable carrying primary stress