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More than words: The online orchestration of word predictability, prosody, gesture, and mouth movements during natural language comprehension

Zhang, Y.; Frassinelli, D.; Tuomainen, J.; Skipper, J. I.; Vigliocco, G.

2020-01-09 neuroscience
10.1101/2020.01.08.896712 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The ecology of human language is face-to-face interaction, comprising cues, like prosody, cospeech gestures, and mouth movements. Yet, the multimodal context is usually stripped away in experiments as dominant paradigms focus on linguistic processing only. In two studies we presented video-clips of an actress producing naturalistic passages to participants whose electroencephalographic activity was recorded. We quantified each cue and determined their effect on a well-established electroencephalographic marker of cognitive load in comprehension (N400). We found that brain responses to words were affected by informativeness of co-occurring multimodal cues, indicating that comprehension relies on linguistic and non-linguistic cues. Moreover, brain responses were affected by interactions between the multimodal cues, indicating that the impact of each cue dynamically changes based on the informativeness of other available cues. Thus, results show that multimodal cues are integral to comprehension, hence, our theories must move beyond the limited focus on speech and linguistic processing.

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