Seminar | How Gestures Facilitate Prediction and Fast Responding during Conversation

In everyday conversations, people take turns at speaking and respond remarkably fast to each other, with typically only a slight gap or a slight overlap between two speaker turns. In this talk, I will present a line of work investigating whether multimodality facilitates the fast language processing necessary during conversations. I will present corpus, behavioural and neuroscientific evidence that seeing hand gestures facilitates fast responding in question-response interactions and that this may be explained by gestures improving predictions of upcoming meaning. I will argue that despite the challenge of having to integrate a plethora of information under significant time constraints, multimodality actually facilitates language processing.