Purpose: Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. This study investigates the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture aligning with each other. Our hypotheses are that (a) in contrastive focus conditions the gesture apex is anchored in the intonation peak, (b) the upcoming prosodic boundary influences the timing of gesture and intonation movements. Method: 15 Catalan speakers pointed at a screen while pronouncing a target word with different metrical patterns in a contrastive focus condition and followed by a phrase boundary. A total of 702 co-speech deictic gestures were acoustically and gesturally analyzed. Results: Intonation peaks and gesture apexes showed parallel behavior with respect to their position within the accented syllable: they occurred at the end of the accented syllable in non-phrase-final position, whereas they occurred well before the end of the accented syllable in phrase-final position. Crucially, the position of intonation peaks and gesture apexes was correlated and was bound by prosodic structure. Conclusions: The results refine the phonological synchronization rule (McNeill, 1992), showing that gesture apexes are anchored in intonation peaks, and that gesture and prosodic movements are bound by prosodic phrasing.

This research was funded by two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grant FFI2009-07648/FILO, “The Role of Tonal Scaling and Tonal Alignment in Distinguishing Intonational Categories in Catalan and Spanish,” and Grant FFI2012-31995, “Gestures, Prosody and Linguistic Structure”); by a grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR-701), awarded to the Grup d’Estudis de Prosòdia; by Grant RECERCAIXA 2012 (for the project “Els Precursors del Llenguatge. Una Guia TIC per a Pares i Educadors” awarded by Obra Social ‘La Caixa’); and by the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (CSD2007-00012) grant.