2009). All video segments

selleck chemical Crizotinib composing the stimuli were culled from 2 h of spontaneous speech recorded in a naturalistic setting (i.e., the kitchen of a house). The scientific research recording featured a female native speaker of North American English who was naïve to the purpose of the recording. A set of questions relevant to the speaker’s life and experiences was prepared prior to the recording. During the recording, the speaker was asked to stand in the kitchen and answer questions posed to her by the experimenter in the adjacent room. Great care was taken to remove speech articulators and other indices of fundamental frequency in an uncontrived, ecologically valid manner. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical The illusion of a cupboard Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical occluding the speaker’s face was created by affixing a piece of plywood (stained to match the wood in the kitchen) to the wall above the stove. Utilizing this naturally produced sample

of speech and gesture (i.e., unscripted and not acted) enabled us to construct stimuli that closely resemble real-world use of conversational speech and gesture. The recording was produced using a Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Sony DCR-HC21 Mini DV Handycam Camcorder secured on a tripod and tilted downward so that only the speaker’s lower neck, torso area, and upper legs were visible. The speaker moved freely and expressed herself in a natural, conversational style throughout the recording. Importantly, although her head was behind the plywood board, her gaze was free to shift from the board directly in front of her Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to the observer sitting on the couch in the adjacent room. Following the spontaneous speech recording, preplanned recordings that would comprise the still body and nonsense hand movement conditions

were made. To create the image for the still body condition, the speaker was recorded as she stood motionless. Next, 12 picture sequences were affixed to the plywood Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical board in front of the speaker’s face, therefore, hidden from the viewpoint of the video camera. The pictures depicted movements that represent words in ASL but which lack obvious iconic meaning to nonsigners (see Fig. 1). The speaker, who neither spoke nor understood ASL, produced each set of movements one time (she neither saw nor practiced the movements in advance of the single-take recording). There were no words written on the pictures, and the speaker did not talk while producing the hand movements. We chose to use (noniconic) ASL hand shapes and movements in the control Entinostat movement condition in order to include a set of hand movements that were produced in the same physical space as beat gesture (i.e., generally in front of the torso), varied in usage of one or both hands, and lacked rhythmic and communicative qualities (when produced by an ASL-naïve speaker). Figure 1 Experimental paradigm. There were six conditions, obtained by crossing movement type (beat gesture, nonsense hand movement, and still frame) by speech (present or absent).