Action-Coordinating Prosody

Nigel G. Ward

Abstract: This paper is an initial exploration of how prosody helps coordinate action, based on examination of speech and motion in a two-player maze game where the players run and jump to avoid obstacles, and coordinate movements to solve problems. We use an unsupervised method, Principal Component Analysis applied to a to a large set of time-spread features, to discover patterns of behavior involving both prosodic features and game actions. These patterns include prosodic constructions involved in assessing, planning, inhibiting, cuing, and synchronizing actions.