Whereas our previous work focused on vocalizations, the current study investigates the gestures that accompany them. In fact, imitative behaviors are widespread in humans, and we have recently shown that imitative vocalizations communicate sounds very effectively. Īs illustrated by this example, speakers often use non-verbal imitative vocalizations and gestures to describe sounds when they run out of words, as sounds are notably difficult to describe for lay persons. You see? First, Ffffff, and then Rrrrrrrr. First you scrape it, then you tear it off and it sounds like Rrrrrrrr off the cardboard. “It sounds like as if you would take a piece of corrugated cardboard. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data are available from: and 10.5281/zenodo.804038.įunding: This work was financed by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, (grant number: 618067, SkAT-VG).Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭonsider this excerpt of a conversation between two persons describing a sound, (gestures are indicated between brackets) : Received: ApAccepted: JPublished: July 27, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Lemaitre et al. rain drops, rustling leaves) pantomimed and embodied by the participants’ gestures.Ĭitation: Lemaitre G, Scurto H, Françoise J, Bevilacqua F, Houix O, Susini P (2017) Rising tones and rustling noises: Metaphors in gestural depictions of sounds. We interpret these metaphors as the result of two kinds of representations elicited by sounds: auditory sensations (pitch and loudness) mapped to spatial position, and causal representations of the sound sources (e.g. Both studies highlighted two metaphors consistently shared across participants: the spatial metaphor of pitch (mapping different pitches to different positions on the vertical dimension), and the rustling metaphor of random fluctuations (rapidly shaking of hands and fingers). Whereas the vocalizations reproduce all features of the referent sounds as faithfully as vocally possible, the gestures focus on one salient feature with metaphors based on auditory-visual correspondences. The results also suggested a different role for vocalizations and gestures. The results showed that these depicting gestures are based on systematic analogies between a referent sound, as interpreted by a receiver, and the visual aspects of the gestures: auditory-visual metaphors. A second, experimental study used non-ecological sounds whose parameters had been specifically designed to elicit the behaviors highlighted in the observational study, and used quantitative measures and inferential statistics. A first, observational study examined a set of vocal and gestural imitations of recordings of sounds representative of a typical everyday environment (ecological sounds) with manual annotations. To this end, two studies investigated the combination of gestures and non-verbal vocalizations. Whereas our previous studies have analyzed vocal imitations, the present research focused on gestural depictions of sounds. This work explored the combination of such vocalizations and gestures to communicate auditory sensations and representations elicited by non-vocal everyday sounds. Communicating an auditory experience with words is a difficult task and, in consequence, people often rely on imitative non-verbal vocalizations and gestures.
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