Timing Relationships between Speech and Co-Verbal Gestures in Spontaneous French

Several studies have described the links between gesture and speech in terms of timing, most of them concentrating on the production of hand gestures during speech or during pauses (Beattie & Aboudan, 1994; Nobe, 2000). Other studies have focused on the anticipation, synchronization or delay of gestures regarding their co-occurrence with speech (Schegloff, 1984; McNeill, 1992, 2005; Kipp, 2003; Loehr, 2004; Chui, 2005; Kida & Faraco, 2008; Leonard and Cummins, 2009) and we would like to participate in the debate in the present paper. We studied the timing relationships between iconic gestures and their lexical affiliates (Kipp, Neff et al., 2001) in a corpus of French conversational speech involving 6 speakers and annotated both in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2009) and Anvil (Kipp, 2001). The timing relationships we observed concerned the position of the gesture stroke as compared to that of the lexical affiliate and the Intonation Phrase, as well as the position of the gesture Phrase as regards that of the Intonation Phrase. The main results show that although gesture and speech are co-occurring, gestures generally start before the related speech segment.