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as speaker A is preparing for his second “scraping” gesture and the
stroke of speaker B's gesture is beginning three frames before the
end of speaker A's stroke. This means that at the same time as he
is producing his gesture, speaker B is attending to speaker A's own
gesture. He cannot know at the beginning of his gesture that the model
will stop after the second “scraping movement”.
The example illustrates a certain multimodal parallelism between
gesture and speech: the case does not correspond to the fusion nor to the
separation described by Tabensky (2001) since the repetition contains
two pieces of information pertaining to two different modalities. The
iconic gesture repeats the information of the scraper, whereas the
utterance produced by B is not an exact repetition of what was said
by speaker A, although some information is similar. At the prosodic
level, however, there is a similarity. The two utterances considered
here form one intonational phrase (IP) each (the IP of speaker B
starting before the end of speaker A's turn, with an overlap of 0.655
s). Both IPs present similar configurations. We can note three things
that are particularly striking though: first of all, speaker A produces
a slightly emphatic accent on “tout” (
all
) which is realized as a slight
reinforcement of the initial plosive /t/. The same reinforcement is
met in the initial plosive of the emphatic word “peint” (
painted
) for
speaker B. Towards the end of the IP we can see a similar list pitch
contour even if the second utterance (B) could be considered as a
confirmation request. Speaker B seems indeed to ask confirmation that
he understood well when saying “it was painted on the wallpaper”
as the first verbal mention of the utterance by speaker A (line 1) did
not make it explicit that the coat of paint had been applied onto the
wallpaper (the utterance “the wall was papered, painted” could be
understood as a chronological description of two actions with no link
between them, not necessarily as the wallpaper being painted).
Nevertheless, the prosodic matching is also expressed by the strong
lengthening associated with the last syllables of words “raclette”
(
scraper
) and “tapisserie” (
wallpaper
), which was described by Portes
et al. (2007) as the main cue of the list contour. And at last, speaker
A adopts a flat trailing contour around 135 Hz on the whole phrase
which is also copied by speaker B with the same f0 height, although
speaker B generally has a much lower voice than speaker A.
The match which occurs both at the gestural and at the prosodic
level is interesting in two respects: first, considering the fact that
the two utterances do not constitute the same kinds of speech acts
—speaker A's utterance is a statement, whereas speaker B's could
be a confirmation request—the two utterances would probably have
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