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Drijvers, L., Small, S. L., & Skipper, J. I. (2025). Language is widely distributed throughout the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26: 189. doi:10.1038/s41583-024-00903-0.
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Ter Bekke, M., Drijvers, L., & Holler, J. (2025). Co-speech hand gestures are used to predict upcoming meaning. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/09567976251331041.
Abstract
In face-to-face conversation, people use speech and gesture to convey meaning. Seeing gestures alongside speech facilitates comprehenders’ language processing, but crucially, the mechanisms underlying this facilitation remain unclear. We investigated whether comprehenders use the semantic information in gestures, typically preceding related speech, to predict upcoming meaning. Dutch adults listened to questions asked by a virtual avatar. Questions were accompanied by an iconic gesture (e.g., typing) or meaningless control movement (e.g., arm scratch) followed by a short pause and target word (e.g., “type”). A Cloze experiment showed that gestures improved explicit predictions of upcoming target words. Moreover, an EEG experiment showed that gestures reduced alpha and beta power during the pause, indicating anticipation, and reduced N400 amplitudes, demonstrating facilitated semantic processing. Thus, comprehenders use iconic gestures to predict upcoming meaning. Theories of linguistic prediction should incorporate communicative bodily signals as predictive cues to capture how language is processed in face-to-face interaction.Additional information
supplementary material -
Drijvers, L., Zaadnoordijk, L., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Sound-symbolism is disrupted in dyslexia: Implications for the role of cross-modal abstraction processes. In D. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 602-607). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Research into sound-symbolism has shown that people can
consistently associate certain pseudo-words with certain referents;
for instance, pseudo-words with rounded vowels and
sonorant consonants are linked to round shapes, while pseudowords
with unrounded vowels and obstruents (with a noncontinuous
airflow), are associated with sharp shapes. Such
sound-symbolic associations have been proposed to arise from
cross-modal abstraction processes. Here we assess the link between
sound-symbolism and cross-modal abstraction by testing
dyslexic individuals’ ability to make sound-symbolic associations.
Dyslexic individuals are known to have deficiencies
in cross-modal processing. We find that dyslexic individuals
are impaired in their ability to make sound-symbolic associations
relative to the controls. Our results shed light on the cognitive
underpinnings of sound-symbolism by providing novel
evidence for the role —and disruptability— of cross-modal abstraction
processes in sound-symbolic eects.
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