Coordination of mouth and hand actions in speech communication

Abstract

International audienceStarting from an evolutionary perspective on vocal vs. gestural origins of language, we shall propose a view in which the coordination between mouth and hand is given a key role in speech communication. We shall present a framework called “Vocalize to Localize” in which deixis is considered as a possible bootstrap for this coordination in both evolution and development. Then we shall present a number of data, in both infants and adults, describing the hand-mouth coordination in deixis in a quantitative way. Finally, we shall describe a framework for studying the mouth-hand coordination to a larger extent, proposing experimental paradigms concerned with the production and perception of prosodic focus