Neurophysiological evidence for rapid processing of verbal and gestural information in understanding communicative actions.

ABSTRACT: During everyday social interaction, gestures are a fundamental part of human communication. The communicative pragmatic role of hand gestures and their interaction with spoken language has been documented at the earliest stage of language development, in which two types of indexical gestures are most prominent: the pointing gesture for directing attention to objects and the give-me gesture for making requests. Here we study, in adult human participants, the neurophysiological signatures of gestural-linguistic acts of communicating the pragmatic intentions of naming and requesting by simultaneously presenting written words and gestures. Already at ~150 ms, brain responses diverged between naming and request actions expressed by word-gesture combination, whereas the same gestures presented i

SUBMITTER: Tomasello R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6841672 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature