Ferrari Ambra, Hagoort Peter
Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Cognition. 2025 Mar;256:106049. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106049. Epub 2024 Dec 24.
Face-to-face communication is not only about 'what' is said but also 'how' it is said, both in speech and bodily signals. Beat gestures are rhythmic hand movements that typically accompany prosodic prominence in conversation. Yet, it is still unclear how beat gestures influence language comprehension. On the one hand, beat gestures may share the same functional role of focus markers as prosodic prominence. Accordingly, they would drive attention towards the concurrent speech and highlight its content. On the other hand, beat gestures may trigger inferences of high speaker confidence, generate the expectation that the sentence content is correct and thereby elicit the commitment to the truth of the statement. This study directly disentangled the two hypotheses by evaluating additive and interactive effects of prosodic prominence and beat gestures on language comprehension. Participants watched videos of a speaker uttering sentences and judged whether each sentence was true or false. Sentences sometimes contained a world knowledge violation that may go unnoticed ('semantic illusion'). Combining beat gestures with prosodic prominence led to a higher degree of semantic illusion, making more world knowledge violations go unnoticed during language comprehension. These results challenge current theories proposing that beat gestures are visual focus markers. To the contrary, they suggest that beat gestures automatically trigger inferences of high speaker confidence and thereby elicit the commitment to the truth of the statement, in line with Grice's cooperative principle in conversation. More broadly, our findings also highlight the influence of metacognition on language comprehension in face-to-face communication.
面对面交流不仅关乎所说的“内容”，还涉及说话的“方式”，包括言语和身体信号。节拍手势是有节奏的手部动作，通常在对话中伴随着韵律重音。然而，节拍手势如何影响语言理解仍不清楚。一方面，节拍手势可能与韵律重音具有相同的焦点标记功能。因此，它们会将注意力引向同时出现的言语并突出其内容。另一方面，节拍手势可能会引发对说话者高信心的推断，产生句子内容正确的预期，从而引发对陈述真实性的认同。本研究通过评估韵律重音和节拍手势对语言理解的累加效应和交互效应，直接区分了这两种假设。参与者观看说话者说出句子的视频，并判断每个句子的真假。句子有时包含可能未被注意到的世界知识违背（“语义错觉”）。将节拍手势与韵律重音结合会导致更高程度的语义错觉，使更多的世界知识违背在语言理解过程中未被注意到。这些结果挑战了当前认为节拍手势是视觉焦点标记的理论。相反，它们表明节拍手势会自动引发对说话者高信心的推断，从而引发对陈述真实性的认同，这与格赖斯对话合作原则一致。更广泛地说，我们的研究结果还突出了元认知在面对面交流中对语言理解的影响。
