The effects of discourse predictability and iconic gestures on sentence comprehension.
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2021-08-23
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en
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An increasing number of studies has investigated language comprehension in natural settings. In these types of settings, various visual cues, such as iconic gestures, are conveyed alongside the auditorily transmitted speech, which serve as contributing sources of information. Iconic gestures have been shown to provide the addressee with valuable information about actions and objects that are referred to in the speech. Importantly, these iconic gestures are often semantically coupled and temporally aligned with spoken entities they denote, thus supplementing speech, and enhancing comprehension from the addressee’s end. Previous literature has shown that comprehenders also frequently engage in predictive processing by exploiting cues from the given discourse context. To date, no study has yet investigated the interaction of iconic gestures and discourse predictability when studying their contribution to sentence comprehension. The present study aimed to fill that gap. EEG was recorded while participants were presented with sentences, where a sentence-initial context was either predictable or non-predictable, and an iconic or a control gesture was coupled with the sentence-final target word. The study focused primarily on the N400 component, to examine main effects of discourse predictability and gesture iconicity, as well as the effect of the interplay of these two factors, with respect to the ease of processing of the target word. Independent main effects of gesture iconicity and discourse predictability were indeed obtained, showing that sentence comprehension can be facilitated by a predictable discourse and an iconic gesture individually. Moreover, an exploratory analysis on a later time window showed that these main effects were sustained, indicating conserved efficiency with respect to the target word processing. Finally, no significant effect was found when the two factors interacted. This later finding poses some interesting questions about the psycholinguistic processing within communicative situ (Holler & Levinson, 2019), which are thoroughly addressed and discussed.
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