A preliminary study of the temporal relationship between prosody and gesture in Hong Kong Cantonese

Previous studies of speech and gesture in intonational languages generally suggested that prosodic and gestural prominence are aligned with one another, pitch accented/ stressed syllable or the peak fundamental frequency (F0) of it being the prosodic anchor. A logical question to raise would be whether such alignment exists in tonal languages without lexical stress. To answer the question, this study investigated the timing of pointing gestures relative to their co-occurring corrective foci in Hong Kong Cantonese in a picture-naming task. Results show that prosodic prominence on the focused syllables was solely realized by durational increases. However, the occurrence of gestural apices was found insensitive to such changes. Neither was it found to be affected by different lexical tones of the foci.