Alignment of beat gestures and prosodic prominence in German

We present evidence on the alignment of beat gestures and prosodic prominence from a video corpus consisting of six German educational videos for students from six presenters. Our analysis of 120 beat gestures (with a substantial variety of hand shapes) shows that beat gestures almost always align with prosodically prominent syllables, i.e., syllables carrying a pitch accent. Specifically, the stroke always starts before, or - more often - on, a pitch-accented syllable; the apex mostly falls on the accented syllable (74%) but may also occur in subsequent syllables. The degree of prosodic prominence of the accented syllable (in terms of DIMA-prominence levels) is predictive for the position of the apex, which occurs within rather than after the accented syllable more often for higher degrees of prominence. These findings provide new insights into the alignment of prominence-lending features of prosody and gesture, thereby broadening the empirical landscape for beat gestures.