Beat gestures can influence on-line spoken word recognition

Beat gestures are common co-speech gestures, and closely coupled with lexical stress. Hence, seeing a beat gesture on an initial syllable can bias people to report hearing a word with initial stress. This study tested whether these effects reflect task-effects or genuine word recognition processes, using the visual world paradigm in eye-tracking. Participants heard auditory stimuli of disyllabic Dutch stress pairs (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM) with clear or ambiguous stress cues, while seeing videos of a talker in the center of the screen producing a beat gesture on the first or second syllable (or no gesture). Results showed that on stress-ambiguous trials, beat gestures guided word recognition in an on-line manner, similar to acoustic stress cues. For instance, a beat gesture on the first syllable biased looks towards VOORnaam before word offset. These results suggest that beat gestures – despite their limited inherent meaning – can affect on-line lexical access.