37.2194, FYI: Making Waves July 2026 Meeting

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2194. Fri Jun 26 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2194, FYI: Making Waves July 2026 Meeting

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Date: 26-Jun-2026
From: Mariia Pronina [mariia.pronina at uib.cat]
Subject: Making Waves July 2026 Meeting


The final meeting of the first season of Making Waves, an online
discussion group launched in October 2025 and dedicated to the
acquisition of prosody and gesture, will take place on Wednesday, July
1, at 15:00 (CET). Patrick L. Rohrer will give a talk titled “From
Speech to Gesture: Theoretical Tensions in the Notion of Prominence”.
We look forward to seeing many of you there and to another lively
discussion.
Abstract:
The notion of prominence plays a central role in research on speech
prosody, where it is generally defined in terms of perceptual salience
and linked to a set of relatively stable acoustic correlates. Despite
ongoing theoretical and methodological debates, prominence remains a
functional and widely operationalized construct within this domain.
However, its extension beyond speech, particularly to gesture, raises
unresolved conceptual and empirical challenges.
In gesture research, prominence is frequently invoked to account for
variation in movement amplitude, temporal alignment, or articulatory
effort. However, the criteria used to assess gestural prominence draw
on multiple parameters whose relative contribution is neither stable
nor well understood. While factors such as size, speed, and spatial
location may each play a role in shaping perceptual salience, it
remains unclear how these dimensions interact, or whether they
converge on a unified perceptual phenomenon at all. The resulting
degrees of freedom make it difficult to determine whether prominence
can be consistently identified across contexts, raising the
possibility that gestural prominence may not be directly comparable to
its prosodic counterpart, or may require modality-specific
conceptualization.
Bringing these perspectives into dialogue, this contribution
highlights a set of open questions concerning the status of prominence
in multimodal communication. To what extent can a notion developed
within speech prosody be meaningfully extended to gesture? What
assumptions about salience and perception underpin such extensions?
Rather than advancing a single position, the talk aims to open a space
for critical reflection and discussion on whether—and how—prominence
can be conceptualized across modalities.
To wrap up:
Time: 1st July 2026, 15:00 – 16:00 (CET)
Topic: From Speech to Gesture: Theoretical Tensions in the Notion of
Prominence
Speaker: Patrick L. Rohrer (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Hosts: Mariia Pronina & Rebecca Woods
Zoom link: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/j/96178988270 (Zoom login required)
The website with all the updated information can be found here -
https://sites.google.com/view/making-waves-group.
Everyone is warmly invited to join us!
Marusia & Becky

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics




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