1. A cross-linguistic comparison of the coordination between hand gestures and phonological prominence Giorgos Tserdanelis

2. Questions 1.If rhythmic hand gestures (beats), more or less, align with stressed syllables in English, then how do they pattern in other languages with different prosodic systems? For example, how do beat gestures align: (A) in languages with no stress but with different rhythmic prominences such as moras, long syllables, or lexical tones (e.g. Korean, Japanese, Cantonese). (B) in languages that exhibit isochrony between stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g.Greek, Spanish). (C) in languages with fixed (predictable) lexical stress (e.g.Hungarian, Czech). (D) in languages with phrasal stress (e.g. French, Turkish). 2.Do speakers of languages with lexical stress gesture more?

3. Hypotheses Gestures that rhythmically accompany speech (i.e. beat gestures) are also based on or at least influenced by the speaker’s internal prosodic representations of timed phonological prominences A beat gesture should be more likely to initiate or center (the apex of the gesture coinciding with beginning of syllable onset) over a phonologically prominent syllable rather than a non-prominent syllable.

4. Hypotheses Cont’d. Beat gestures may be optional companions to prosodic prominences in spoken language, arising from a cognitive alignment of vocal gestures with hand gestures in a reinforcing, motoric pattern of coordination and harmonization between mouth and hand. Spoken prosodic prominences may have evolved parasitically to original rhythmic hand gestures, that functioned as the scaffolding for the evolution of spoken phonological systems parallel to some ancestral gestural (sign language) phonology.

5. Theoretical Implications If there is a constant alignment between phonologically marked syllables and beat gestures cross-linguistically, then is the claim of a common neurological basis of prosodic prominence and gestural prominence supported? Are beat gestures an automatically synchronized visual manifestation of language-specific prosodic structure or are they independently coordinated (for the speaker or for the listener or both) and not part of the underlying, language-specific phonological grammar?

6. Theoretical Implications Cont’d. If beat gestures (non-representational) are more frequent in languages with stress, then can one claim that phonological grammar has a direct influence on the types and frequency of gestures used by speakers of certain types of languages? What would such a finding imply about the origins of language as a communication system using two distinct modalities today? Could this be interpreted as evidence that spoken languages may have co-evolved with sign languages? Perhaps prosodic prominences in spoken languages today has their origins in “beat” vocalizations during signing in the early stages of language evolution.