Gestures cued by demonstratives in speech guide listeners' visual attention during spatial language comprehension

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Human Communication

Background:

• Gestures play a crucial role in enhancing communication, especially for visual-spatial information.
• Speakers often use gestures to complement deictic constructions (e.g., "here") to convey spatial details.
• Listeners' visual attention to gestures in different speech contexts remains under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether listeners direct more visual attention to gestures that complement demonstratives versus those that provide redundant information.
• To determine if visual attention to gestures correlates with listeners' comprehension of the conveyed information.

Main Methods:

• Participants' eye movements were tracked while they watched and listened to speakers.
• Gestures were presented in two conditions: complementing demonstratives and providing redundant information.
• Listener comprehension was assessed after the stimuli presentation.

Main Results:

• Listeners fixated more on gestures when they complemented speech (e.g., "here") compared to when they were redundant (e.g., "right").
• Overt visual attention to gestures did not predict listeners' information uptake or comprehension.
• External cues like demonstratives guide visual attention to gestures.

Conclusions:

• Heightened communicative value, signaled by demonstratives, directs listeners' visual attention to gestures.
• Overt visual attention to gestures is not essential for extracting information from multimodal communication.
• Gesture comprehension relies on more than just direct visual focus.