ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2018
Processing language in face-to-face conversation: Questions with gestures get faster responses.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Variation in Interactive Gestures by Visual Occlusion and Topic Complexity: Evidence for a Subconscious Theory of Gesture.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- A Scoping Review on Conversational Memory and Characteristics of Conversations in Alzheimer's Disease.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Article
- Human turn-taking development: A multi-faceted review of turn-taking comprehension and production in the first years of life.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Effect of auditory cues to lexical stress on the visual perception of gestural timing.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Prior expectations guide multisensory integration during face-to-face communication.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Co-Speech Hand Gestures Are Used to Predict Upcoming Meaning.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Pragmatic Skills in Late Adulthood.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2024Article
- Gestures speed up responses to questions.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2024Article
- Facilitating question identification through natural intensity eyebrow movements in virtual avatars.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Social uncertainty promotes signal complexity during approaches in wild chimpanzees (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Gesture links language and cognition for spoken and signed languages.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- Beyond speaking: neurocognitive perspectives on language production in social interaction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The multimodal facilitation effect in human communication.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Children benefit from gestures to understand degraded speech but to a lesser extent than adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Timing in Conversation.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Turn-timing in conversations between autistic adults: Typical short-gap transitions are preferred, but not achieved instantly.PloS one · 2023Article
- Multimodal processing in face-to-face interactions: A bridging link between psycholinguistics and sensory neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Specific facial signals associate with categories of social actions conveyed through questions.PloS one · 2023Article
- Embodied Processing at Six Linguistic Granularity Levels: A Consensus Paper.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The home of human language use is face-to-face interaction, a context in which communicative exchanges are characterised not only by bodily signals accompanying what is being said but also by a pattern of alternating turns at talk. This transition between turns is astonishingly fast-typically a mere 200-ms elapse between a current and a next speaker's contribution-meaning that comprehending, producing, and coordinating conversational contributions in time is a significant challenge. This begs the question of whether the additional information carried by bodily signals facilitates or hinders language processing in this time-pressured environment. We present analyses of multimodal conversations revealing that bodily signals appear to profoundly influence language processing in interaction: Questions accompanied by gestures lead to shorter turn transition times-that is, to faster responses-than questions without gestures, and responses come earlier when gestures end before compared to after the question turn has ended. These findings hold even after taking into account prosodic patterns and other visual signals, such as gaze. The empirical findings presented here provide a first glimpse of the role of the body in the psycholinguistic processes underpinning human communication.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.