Oscillatory gestures and discourse

Gesture and speech are part of a single human language system. They are co-expressive and complementary channels in the act of speaking. While speech carries the major load of symbolic presentation, gesture provides the imagistic content. Proceeding from the established contemporality of gesture and speech, we discuss our work on oscillatory gestures and speech. We present our wavelet-based approach in gestural oscillation extraction as geodesic ridges in frequency-time space. We motivate the potential of such computational cross-modal language analysis by performing a micro analysis of a video dataset in which a subject describes her living space. We demonstrate the ability of our algorithm to extract gestural oscillations and show how oscillatory gestures reveal portions of the discourse structure.