Presentations

Abstract

Human communication requires interlocutors to mutually understand each other. Previous research has suggested inter-brain synchrony as an important feature of social interaction, since it has been observed during joint attention, speech interactions and cooperative tasks. Nonetheless, it is still unknown whether inter-brain synchrony is actually related to successful face-to-face communication. Here, we use dual-EEG to study if inter-brain synchrony is modulated during episodes of successful and unsuccessful communication in clear and noisy communication settings. Dyads performed a tangram-based referential communication task with and without background noise, while both their EEG and audiovisual behavior was recorded. Other-initiated repairs were annotated in the audiovisual data and were used as indexes of unsuccessful and successful communication. More specifically, we compared inter-brain synchrony during episodes of miscommunication (repair initiations) and episodes of mutual understanding (repair solutions and acceptance phases) in the clear and the noise condition. We expect that when communication is successful, inter-brain synchrony will be stronger than when communication is unsuccessful, and we expect that these patterns will be most pronounced in the noise condition. Results are currently being analyzed and will be presented and discussed with respect to the inter-brain neural signatures underlying the process of mutual understanding in face-to-face conversation.

Abstract

Coordination is at the heart of human conversation. In order to interact with one another through talk, we must coordinate at many levels, first and foremost at the level of our mental states, intentions and conversational contributions. In this talk, I will present findings on the pragmatics of multi-modal communication from both production and comprehension studies. In terms of production, I will talk about (1) how co-speech gestures are used in the coordination of meaning allowing interactants to arrive at a shared understanding of the things they talk about, as well as on (2) how gesture and gaze are employed in the coordination of speaking turns in conversation, with special reference to the psycholinguistic and cognitive challenges that turn-taking poses. In terms of comprehension, I will focus on the interplay of ostensive (social gaze) and semantic (gesture) signals in the context of intention perception and language processing. My talk will bring different sets of findings together to argue for richer research paradigms that capture more of the complexities and sociality of face-to-face conversational interaction. Advancing the field of multi-modal communication research in this direction will allow us to more fully understand the psycholinguistic processes that underlie human language use and language comprehension.

Abstract

Human language has long been considered a unimodal
activity, with the body being considered a mere vehicle
for expressing acoustic linguistic meaning. But theories of
language evolution point towards a close link between
vocal and visual communication early on in history,
pinpointing gesture as the origin of human language.
Some consider this link between gesture and
communicative vocalisations as having been temporary,
with conventionalized linguistic code eventually replacing
early bodily signaling. Others argue for this link being
permanent, positing that even fully-fledged human
language is a multi-modal phenomenon, with visual
signals forming integral components of utterances in faceto-
face conversation. My research provides evidence for
the latter. Based on this research, I will provide insights
into some of the factors and principles governing multimodal
language use in adult interaction. My talk consists
of three parts: First, I will present empirical findings
showing that movements we produce with our body are
indeed integral to spoken language and closely linked to
communicative intentions underlying speaking. Second, I
will show that bodily signals, first and foremost manual
gestures, play an active role in the coordination of
meaning during face-to-face interaction, including
fundamental processes like the grounding of referential
utterances. Third, I will present recent findings on the role
of bodily communicative acts in the psycholinguistically
challenging context of turn-taking during conversation.
Together, the data I present form the basis of a framework
aiming to capture multi-modal language use and
processing situated in face-to-face interaction, the
environment in which language first emerged, is acquired
and used most.

Abstract

Conversation is the core niche of human multi-modal language use and it is characterized by a system of taking turns. This organization poses a particular psycholinguistic challenge for its participants: considering the gap between two speaking turns averages around just 200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009) but the production of single word utterances takes a minimum of 600 ms alone (Indefrey & Levelt, 2004), language production and comprehension must largely run in parallel; while listening to an on-going turn, a next speaker has to predict the upcoming content and end of that turn to start preparing their own and launch it on time (Levinson, 2013). Recently, research has begun to investigate the cognitive processes underpinning turn-taking (see Holler et al., 2015 for an overview), but this research has focused on the spoken modality. The present study investigates the role co-speech gestures may play in this process. We analysed a corpus of 7 casual face-to-face conversations between English speakers for all question-response sequences (N=281), the gestures that accompanied the identified set of questions, and the timing of these gestures with respect to the speaking turns they accompanied. Moreover, we measured the length of all inter-turn gaps in our set. Our main research question was whether the length of the gap between turns varied systematically as a consequence of questions being accompanied by gesture. Our results revealed that this is indeed the case: Questions with a gestural component were responded to significantly faster than questions without a gestural component. This finding holds when we consider head and hand gestures separately, when we control for points of possible completion in the verbal utterance prior to turn end, and when we control for complexity associated with question type. Furthermore, our findings revealed that within the group of questions accompanied by gestures, those questions whose gestures retracted prior to turn end were responded to faster than questions whose gestures retracted following turn end. This study provides evidence that gestures accompanying spoken questions in conversation facilitate the coordination of turns. While experimental studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of gestures on language processing, this is the first evidence that gestures may benefit processing even in the rich, cognitively challenging context of conversational interaction. That is, gestures appear to play an important psycholinguistic function during immersed, in situ language processing. Experimental work is currently exploring at which level (semantic, pragmatic, perceptual) the facilitative effects we found are operating. The findings not only suggest psycholinguistic processing benefits but also expand on previous turn-taking models that restrict the function of gesture to turn-yielding/-keeping cues (Duncan, 1972) as well as on turn-taking models focusing primarily on the verbal modality (Sacks et al., 1974).

Abstract

In communication, speech is often accompanied by co-speech gestures, which embody a link between language and action. Language impairments in Parkinson’s disease (PD) are particularly pronounced for action-related words in comparison to nouns. People with PD produce fewer gestures from a first-person perspective when they describe others’ actions (Humphries et al., 2016), which may reflect a difficulty in simulation. We extended this to investigate the gestural depiction of other types of action information such as “manner” (how an action is performed) and “path” (the trajectory of a moving figure in space). We also explored whether the level of motion required to perform an action influences the way that people with PD use gestures to depict those actions. 37 people with PD and 35 age-matched controls viewed a cartoon which included low motion actions (e.g. hiding, knocking) and high motion actions (e.g. running, climbing), and described it to an addressee. We analysed the co-speech gestures they spontaneously produced while doing so. Overall gesture rate was similar in both groups, but people with PD produced action-gestures at a significantly lower rate than controls in both motion conditions. Also, people with PD produced significantly fewer manner and first-person action gestures than controls in the high motion condition (but not the low motion condition). Our findings suggest that motor impairments in PD contribute to the way in which actions, especially high motion actions, are depicted gesturally. Thus, people with Parkinson’s may have particular difficulty cognitively representing high motion actions

Abstract

Human language has long been considered a unimodal activity, with the body being considered a mere vehicle
for expressing acoustic linguistic meaning. But theories of
language evolution point towards a close link between
vocal and visual communication early on in history,
pinpointing gesture as the origin of human language.
Some consider this link between gesture and
communicative vocalisations as having been temporary,
with conventionalized linguistic code eventually replacing
early bodily signaling. Others argue for this link being
permanent, positing that even fully-fledged human
language is a multi-modal phenomenon, with visual
signals forming integral components of utterances in faceto-
face conversation. My research provides evidence for
the latter. Based on this research, I will provide insights
into some of the factors and principles governing multimodal
language use in adult interaction. My talk consists
of three parts: First, I will present empirical findings
showing that movements we produce with our body are
indeed integral to spoken language and closely linked to
communicative intentions underlying speaking. Second, I
will show that bodily signals, first and foremost manual
gestures, play an active role in the coordination of
meaning during face-to-face interaction, including
fundamental processes like the grounding of referential
utterances. Third, I will present recent findings on the role
of bodily communicative acts in the psycholinguistically
challenging context of turn-taking during conversation.
Together, the data I present form the basis of a framework
aiming to capture multi-modal language use and
processing situated in face-to-face interaction, the
environment in which language first emerged, is acquired
and used most.

Abstract

The primordial site of conversation is face-to-face social interaction where participants make use of visual modalities, as well as talk, in the coordination of collaborative action. This most basic observation leads to a fundamental question: what is the place of multimodal resources such as these in the organisation of turn-taking for conversation? To answer this question, we collected a corpus of both dyadic and triadic face-to-face interactions between adults, with the aim to build on existing observations of the use of visual bodily modalities in conversation (e.g., Duncan, 1972; Goodwin, 1981; Kendon, 1967; Lerner 2003; Mondada 2007; Oloff, 2013; Rossano, 2012; Sacks & Schegloff, 2002; Schegloff, 1998).

The corpus retains the spontaneity and naturalness of everyday talk as much as possible while combining it with state-of-the-art technology to allow for exact, detailed analyses of verbal and visual conversational behaviours. Each participant (1) was filmed by three high definition video cameras (providing a frontal plus two lateral views) allowing for fine-grained, frame-by-frame analyses of bodily conduct, as well as the precise measurement of how individual bodily behaviours are timed with respect to each other, and with respect to speech; (2) wore a head-mounted microphone providing high quality recordings of the audio signal suitable for determining on- and off-sets of speaking turns, as well as inter-turn gaps, with high precision, (3) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses to monitor eye movements and fixations overlaid onto a video recording of the visual scene the participant was viewing at any given moment (including the other [two] participant[s] and the surroundings in which the conversation took place). The HD video recordings of body behaviour, the eye-tracking video recordings, and the audio recordings from all 2/3 participants engaged in each conversation were then integrated within a single software application (ELAN) for synchronised playback and analysis.

The analyses focus on the use and interplay of visual bodily resources, including eye gaze, co-speech gestures, and body posture, during conversational coordination, as well as on how these signals interweave with participants’ turns at talk. The results provide insight into the process of turn projection as evidenced by participants’ gaze behaviour with a focus on the role different bodily cues play in this context, and into how concurrent visual and verbal resources are involved in turn construction and turn allocation. This project will add to our understanding of core issues in the field of CA, such as by elucidating the role of multi-modality and number of participants engaged in talk-in-interaction (Schegloff, 2009).

References

Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 283-92.

Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press.

Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologia, 26, 22-63.

Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Language in Society, 32(02), 177–201.

Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking: Pointing and the emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Studies, 9, 195-226.

Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. Journal of Pragmatics, 46, 139-156.

Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze behavior in face-to-face interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.

Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. (2002). Home position. Gesture, 2, 133-146.

Schegloff, E. (1998). Body torque. Social Research, 65, 535-596.

Schegloff, E. (2009). One perspective on Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives. In J. Sidnell (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives, pp. 357-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

The primordial site of conversation is face-to-face social interaction where participants make use of visual modalities, as well as talk, in the coordination of collaborative action. This most basic observation leads to a fundamental question: what is the place of multimodal resources such as these in the organisation of turn-taking for conversation? To answer this question, we collected a corpus of both dyadic and triadic face-to-face interactions between adults, with the aim to build on existing observations of the use of visual bodily modalities in conversation (e.g., Duncan, 1972; Goodwin, 1981; Kendon, 1967; Lerner 2003; Mondada 2007; Oloff, 2013; Rossano, 2012; Sacks & Schegloff, 2002; Schegloff, 1998). The corpus retains the spontaneity and naturalness of everyday talk as much as possible while combining it with state-of-the-art technology to allow for exact, detailed analyses of verbal and visual conversational behaviours. Each participant (1) was filmed by three high definition video cameras (providing a frontal plus two lateral views) allowing for fine-grained, frame-by-frame analyses of bodily conduct, as well as the precise measurement of how individual bodily behaviours are timed with respect to each other, and with respect to speech; (2) wore a head-mounted microphone providing high quality recordings of the audio signal suitable for determining on- and off-sets of speaking turns, as well as inter-turn gaps, with high precision, (3) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses to monitor eye movements and fixations overlaid onto a video recording of the visual scene the participant was viewing at any given moment (including the other [two] participant[s] and the surroundings in which the conversation took place). The HD video recordings of body behaviour, the eye-tracking video recordings, and the audio recordings from all 2/3 participants engaged in each conversation were then integrated within a single software application (ELAN) for synchronised playback and analysis. The analyses focus on the use and interplay of visual bodily resources, including eye gaze, co-speech gestures, and body posture, during conversational coordination, as well as on how these signals interweave with participants’ turns at talk. The results provide insight into the process of turn projection as evidenced by participants’ gaze behaviour with a focus on the role different bodily cues play in this context, and into how concurrent visual and verbal resources are involved in turn construction and turn allocation. This project will add to our understanding of core issues in the field of CA, such as by elucidating the role of multi-modality and number of participants engaged in talk-in-interaction (Schegloff, 2009). References Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 283-92. Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press. Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologia, 26, 22-63. Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Language in Society, 32(02), 177–201. Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking: Pointing and the emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Studies, 9, 195-226. Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. Journal of Pragmatics, 46, 139-156. Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze behavior in face-to-face interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. (2002). Home position. Gesture, 2, 133-146. Schegloff, E. (1998). Body torque. Social Research, 65, 535-596. Schegloff, E. (2009). One perspective on Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives. In J. Sidnell (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives, pp. 357-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Coordination is at the heart of human conversation. In order to interact with one another through talk, we must coordinate at many levels, first and foremost at the level of our mental states, intentions and conversational contributions. In this talk, I will present findings on the pragmatics of multi-model communication from both production and comprehension studies. In terms of production, I will throw light on (1) how co-speech gestures are used in the coordination of meaning to allow interactants to arrive ate a shared understanding of the thins we talk about, as well as on (2) how gesture and gaze are employed in the coordination of speaking turns in spontaneous conversation, with special reference to the psycholinguistic and cognitive challenges that turn-taking poses. In terms of comprehension, I will focus on communicative intentions and the interplay of ostensive and semantic multi-model signals in triadic communication contexts. My talk will bring these different findings together to make the argument for richer reearch paradigms that capture more of the complexities and sociality of face-to-face conversational interactoin. Advancing the field of multi-model communication in this way will allow us to more fully understand the psycholinguistic processes that underlie human language use and language comprehension.

Abstract

The primordial site of conversation is face-to-face social interaction where participants make use of visual modalities, as well as talk, in the coordination of collaborative action (Clark, 1996). This observation leads to a fundamental question: what is the place of multimodal resources such as these in the organisation of turn-taking for conversation’o To answer this question, we collected a corpus of both dyadic and triadic face-to-face interactions between adult native English speakers, with the aim to build on existing observations of the use of visual bodily modalities in conversation (e.g., Duncan, 1972; Goodwin, 1981; Kendon, 1967; Lerner 2003; Mondada 2007; Oloff, 2013; Rossano, 2012; Sacks & Schegloff, 2002; Schegloff, 1998). The corpus retains much of the spontaneity and naturalness of everyday talk while combining it with state-of-the-art technology to allow for exact, detailed analyses of verbal and visual conversational behaviours. Each participant (1) was filmed by three high definition video cameras (providing a frontal plus two lateral views) allowing for fine-grained, frame-by-frame analyses of bodily conduct, as well as the precise measurement of how individual bodily behaviours are timed with respect to each other, and with respect to speech; (2) wore a head-mounted microphone providing high quality recordings of the audio signal suitable for determining on- and off-sets of speaking turns, as well as inter-turn gaps, with high precision, (3) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses to monitor eye movements and fixations overlaid onto a video recording of the visual scene the participant was viewing at any given moment (including the other [two] participant[s] and the surroundings in which the conversation took place). The HD video recordings of body behaviour, the eye-tracking video recordings, and the audio recordings from all 2/3 participants engaged in each conversation were then integrated within a single software application (ELAN) for synchronised playback and analysis. All data have been transcribed, coded for co-speech gestures and gaze fixations on a frame-by-frame basis. The large amount of data obtained from this corpus is currently being analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The project aims to shed light on the cognitive puzzle that turn-taking presents us with (Levinson, 2013); interlocutors are confronted with the challenge of comprehending an on-going turn while, at the same time, planning a response and estimating when the current speaker’s talk will end in order to time their contribution as precisely as possible (the average gap between turns is a mere 200ms). The results from this project provide insight into the process of turn projection as evidenced by participants’ gaze behaviour with a focus on the role different bodily cues play in this context. Our findings so far show that co-speech gestures may play an important role in this process by guiding the projection of upcoming turn boundaries and next actions. In all, this project elucidates the role of multi-modality in the organisation of turns at talk and in the cognitive processes that underlie this organisation

Abstract

The primordial site of conversation is face-to-face social interaction where participants make use of visual modalities, as well as talk, in the coordination of collaborative action. This most basic observation leads to a fundamental question: what is the place of multimodal resources such as these in the organisation of turn-taking for conversation? To answer this question, we collected a corpus of both dyadic and triadic face-to-face interactions between adults, with the aim to build on existing observations of the use of visual bodily modalities in conversation (e.g., Duncan, 1972; Goodwin, 1981; Kendon, 1967; Lerner 2003; Mondada 2007; Oloff, 2013; Rossano, 2012; Sacks & Schegloff, 2002; Schegloff, 1998). The corpus retains the spontaneity and naturalness of everyday talk as much as possible while combining it with state-of-the-art technology to allow for exact, detailed analyses of verbal and visual conversational behaviours. Each participant (1) was filmed by three high definition video cameras (providing a frontal plus two lateral views) allowing for fine-grained, frame-by-frame analyses of bodily conduct, as well as the precise measurement of how individual bodily behaviours are timed with respect to each other, and with respect to speech; (2) wore a head-mounted microphone providing high quality recordings of the audio signal suitable for determining on- and off-sets of speaking turns, as well as inter-turn gaps, with high precision, (3) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses to monitor eye movements and fixations overlaid onto a video recording of the visual scene the participant was viewing at any given moment (including the other [two] participant[s] and the surroundings in which the conversation took place). The HD video recordings of body behaviour, the eye-tracking video recordings, and the audio recordings from all 2/3 participants engaged in each conversation were then integrated within a single software application (ELAN) for synchronised playback and analysis. The analyses focus on the use and interplay of visual bodily resources, including eye gaze, co-speech gestures, and body posture, during conversational coordination, as well as on how these signals interweave with participants’ turns at talk. The results provide insight into the process of turn projection as evidenced by participants’ gaze behaviour with a focus on the role different bodily cues play in this context, and into how concurrent visual and verbal resources are involved in turn construction and turn allocation. This project will add to our understanding of core issues in the field of CA, such as by elucidating the role of multi-modality and number of participants engaged in talk-in-interaction (Schegloff, 2009). References Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 283-92. Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press. Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologia, 26, 22-63. Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Language in Society, 32(02), 177–201. Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking: Pointing and the emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Studies, 9, 195-226. Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. Journal of Pragmatics, 46, 139-156. Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze behavior in face-to-face interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. (2002). Home position. Gesture, 2, 133-146. Schegloff, E. (1998). Body torque. Social Research, 65, 535-596. Schegloff, E. (2009). One perspective on Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives. In J. Sidnell (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative perspectives, pp. 357-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive, neurological dis- order caused by the loss of dopaminergic cells in the basal ganglia, which is involved in motor control. This leads to the cardinal motor symptoms of PD: tremor, bradykinesia (slow- ness of movement), rigidity and postural instability. PD also leads to general cognitive impairment (executive function, memory, visuospatial abilities), and language impairments; PD patients perform worse at language tasks such as provid- ing word definitions and naming objects, generating lists of verbs, and naming actions. Thus, there seems to be a par- ticular impairment for action-language. Despite the fact that action and language are both impaired in PD, little research has explored if and how co-speech gestures, which embody a link between these two domains, are affected. The Ges- ture as Simulated Action hypothesis argues that gestures arise from cognitive representations or simulations of actions. It has been argued that people with PD may be less able to cog- nitively represent, simulate and imagine actions, which could account for their action-language impairment and may also mean that gestures are affected. Recently, it has been shown that while there is not a straightforward reduction in gesture use in PD, patients’ gestures which described actions are less precise/informative than those of controls. However, partici- pants only described two actions, and to a knowing addressee (so the task was not communicative). The present study extended this by asking participants to describe a wide range of actions in an apparently commu- nicative task, and compared viewpoint as well as precision between the two groups. Gesture viewpoint was examined in order to provide a window into the cognitive representa- tions underlying gesture, by demonstrating whether or not the speaker has placed themselves as the agent within the ac- tion (character viewpoint), requiring a cognitive simulation of the action. Overall, studying gestures in PD has clinical relevance, and will provide insight into the cognitive basis of gestures in healthy people. 25 PD patients and 25 age-matched controls viewed 10 pictures and 10 videos depicting a range of actions and de- scribed them to help an addressee identify the correct stimu- lus. No difference in the rate of gesture production between the two groups was found. However, the precision of ges- tures describing actions was found to be significantly lower in the PD group. Furthermore, the proportion of gestures produced from character viewpoint was found to differ be- tween the groups, with PD patients producing significantly less C-VPT gestures. This suggests that the cognitive repre- sentations underlying the gestures have changed in PD, and that people with PD are less able to imagine themselves as the agent of the action. This supports the GSA hypothesis by demonstrating that gesture production changes when the abil- ity to perform and to cognitively simulate actions is impaired. Our next study will assess the relationships between cognitive factors affected in PD and gesture, and motor imagery ability and gesture. The study will also examine gestures produced by people with PD when describing a wide range of semantic content in various communicative situations.

Abstract

Background: Gesture and speech are theorized to form a sin- gle integrated system of meaning during language produc- tion (McNeill, 1992), and evidence is mounting that this in- tegration applies to language comprehension as well (Kelly, Ozyurek & Maris, 2010). However, it is unknown whether gesture is uniquely integrated with speech or is processed like any other manual action. To explore this issue, we compared the extent to which speech is integrated with hand gestures versus actual actions on objects during comprehension. Method: The present study employed a priming paradigm in two experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects watched multi- modal videos that presented auditory (words) and visual (ges- tures and actions on objects) information. Half the subjects related the audio information to a written prime presented be- fore the video, and the other half related the visual informa- tion to the written prime. For half of the multimodal video stimuli, the audio and visual information was congruent, and for the other half, incongruent. The task was to press one but- ton if the written prime was the same as the visual (31 sub- jects) or audio (31 subjects) information in the target video or another button if different. RT and accuracy were recorded. Results: In Experiment 2, we reversed the priming se- quence with a different set of 18 subjects. Now the video became the prime and the written verb followed as the target, but the task was the same with one differenceXto indicate whether the written target was related or unrelated to only the audio information (speech) in preceding video prime. ERPs were recorded to the written targets. In Experiment 1, subjects in both the audio and visual tar- get tasks were less accurate when processing stimuli in which gestures and actions were incongruent versus congruent with speech, F(1, 60) = 22.90, p < .001, but this effect was less prominent for speech-action than for speech-gesture stimuli. However, subjects were more accurate when identifying ac- tions versus gestures, F(1, 60) = 8.03, p = .006. In Experiment 2, there were two early ERP effects. When primed with gesture, incongruent primes produced a larger P1, t (17) = 3.75, p = 0.002, and P2, t (17) = 3.02, p = 0.008, to the target words than the congruent condition in the grand-averaged ERPs (reflecting early perceptual and atten- tional processes). However, there were no significant differ- ences between congruent and incongruent conditions when primed with action. Discussion: The incongruency effect replicates and ex- tends previous work by Kelly et al. (2010) by showing not only a bi-directional influence of gesture and speech, but also of action and speech. In addition, the results show that while actions are easier to process than gestures (Exp. 1), gestures may be more tightly tied to the processing of accompanying speech (Exps. 1 & 2). These results suggest that even though gestures are perceptually less informative than actions, they may be treated as communicatively more informative in rela- tion to the accompanying speech. In this way, the two types of visual information might have different status in language comprehension.