Research Topics
Experimental Studies on Grammatical Intonation and Gesture
In everyday communication, we rely not only on the content of speech, but also on vocal intonation and gestures to convey our intentions and to understand those of others. Intonation and gestures can indicate not only the speaker’s emotion, but also the grammatical relationships between words.
It has long been known that intonation patterns in Japanese change according to the intended syntactic structure. Additionally, gesture patterns that accompany an utterance are known to vary depending on the grammatical features of the speaker’s native language. My research investigates (1) how speakers produce intonation and gestures when communicating syntactically ambiguous sentences and (2) how listeners infer speaker’s intentions from these utterances.
Construction of a Gesture-Annotated Corpus
Previous studies have suggested that certain gestures correspond to specific syntactic structures, and that verbs, as the grammatical heads of sentences, are frequently represented by gestures. Additionally, based on my own research mentioned above, it can be hypothesized that grammatical heads are more likely to be expressed through gestures.
To test this hypothesis, we are constructing a gesture-annotated corpus by recording conversations on topics that naturally elicit gestures. To collect conversations where participants naturally produce gestures, they are asked to watch video stimuli featuring characters with a lot of movement, and then to explain the content to others.
Examination of Interview Methods to Elicit Knowledge from Experts in Specific Domains
Under construction…
Grants
2024
- Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists.”Constructing a gesture-annotated corpus and examining syntactic gestures” (2024–2028, Principal Investigator) Details
- Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)「Development of a foundation model for processing various dialects that enables analysis and retrieval of dialect speech data」(2024–2027, Co-Investigator) Details