Combining gestures and vocalizations to imitate sounds

International audience; Communicating about sounds is a difficult task without a technical language, and naïve speakers often rely on different kinds of non-linguistic vocalizations and body gestures (Lemaitre et al. 2014). Previous work has independently studied how effectively people describe sounds with gestures or vocalizations (Caramiaux, 2014, Lemaitre and Rocchesso, 2014). However, speech communication studies suggest a more intimate link between the two processes (Kendon, 2004). Our study thus focused on the combination of manual gestures and non-speech vocalizations in the communication of sounds. We first collected a large database of vocal and gestural imitations of a variety of …