Functional and temporal relations between spoken and gestured components of language: A corpus-based inquiry

Based on the Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment Corpus (Lücking et al. 2013), this paper presents a systematic comparison of the linguistic characteristics of unimodal (speech only) and multimodal (gesture-accompanied) forms of language use. The results suggest that each of these two modes of expression is characterized by statistical preferences for certain types of words and grammatical categories. The words that are most frequently accompanied by a manual gesture, when controlled for their total frequency, include unspecific spatial lexemes, various deictic words, and particles that express difficulty in word retrieval or formulation. Other linguistic items, including pronouns and verbs of cognition, show a strong dispreference for being gesture-accompanied. The second part of the paper shows that gestures do not occur within a fixed time window relative to the word(s) they relate to, but the preferred temporal distance varies with the type of functional relation that exists between the verbal and gestural channel.