A relação entre unidades gestuais e as retrações da fala: um estudo baseado em corpus

Abstract

The research presented in this project aims to analyze the relation between gesture and speech disfluencies. To this end, the Brazilian Gesture Corpus - BGEST (BARROS, 2021) was used. BGEST is a multimodal corpus that compiles informal Portuguese-Brazilian spontaneous speech, specifically, monologues. Disfluencies are defined as flaws in speech production that jeopardize the flow of spontaneous speech, and may be revealed through hesitations, errors, and repairs (LICKLEY, 2015). This research, therefore, has focused on retractings, a form of disfluency defined by the Language into Act Theory (CRESTI, 2000; MONEGLIA, RASO, 2014) characterized by false starts, in which the speaker repairs, within the utterance itself, what was said (RASO, 2012). The study of gestures alongside speech disfluencies comes from the notion that speech and gesture arise from one integrated system (MCNEILL, 1992; KENDON, 2004), thus, when there are speech disfluencies, there should also be gesture disfluencies. The results here point to a narrow relation between gesture and retractings, as there were found both instances of ongoing gestures alongside the disfluencies, as well as the holding of the gestures. However, when it comes to the latter, the gesture temporal barriers tend to mirror the retracting barriers, and a considerable part of the results show that gesture and speech stop and resume at the same time, as found in previous research (AKHAVAN et al., 2016). Therefore, more studies into the relation between speech and gesture production are necessary.