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Knowing ‘who she is’ based on ‘where she is’: The effect of co-speech gesture on pronoun comprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2014

Whitney Goodrich Smith  and
Carla L. Hudson Kam
Whitney Goodrich Smith*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Carla L. Hudson Kam
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
Correspondence addresses: Whitney Goodrich Smith, University of Maryland, College Park, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Room 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: wgs@umd.edu.
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Abstract

We examine whether pronoun interpretation is affected by naturalistic co-speech gesture. Participants in three conditions watched narrations containing ambiguous pronouns. In one condition the narrator produced gestures consistent with order-of-mention; in another, they conflicted with order-of-mention; and in the third, she did not gesture. Results showed that when the gestures conflicted with order-of-mention participants were much less likely to interpret the pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character. In a second experiment we ruled out the possibility that participants were simply picking up on differences within the speech itself. These results extend previous work on gesture and language processing by showing that the information in gesture can influence the way people interpret words which by their nature are ambiguous, and that this influence is similar to that of well-known speech internal cues.

Keywords

gesturelanguage comprehensionpronoun resolutionreferent processing
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 75 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2012

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