Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the processing of symbolic communicative gestures, such as pantomimes and emblems, but well-controlled stimuli have been scarce. This ...

We tested the prosodic hypothesis that the temporal alignment of a speaker's beat gestures in a sentence influences syntactic parsing by driving the listener's attention. Participants chose between two possible interpretations ...

During public addresses, speakers accompany their discourse with spontaneous hand gestures (beats) that are tightly synchronized with the prosodic contour of the discourse. It has been proposed that speech and beat gestures ...