ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the difficulties encountered in the experimental investigation of speech-related gesture understanding. It is possible to compare comprehension of utterances with or without gestures, with congruent or incongruent gestures and, more recently, to record cerebral activity during multimodal speech processing. Susan Goldin-Meadow and her co-workers also found that simply seeing gestures helped children to learn solutions to the mathematical equivalence problems. The cognitive psychology of verbal comprehension identifies a set of operations that are required to access message meaning from auditory and visual signals: perceptual analyses, segmental and supra-segmental phonetic processing, word recognition, syntactic parsing, thematic assignment, integration into a discourse model. The main interest of electrophysiological techniques in cognitive psychology is the information they provide about the processing stages that precede overt response production. In the domain of gesture processing, the results strengthen the conclusion that, contrary to what Krauss and co-workers asserted, representational gestures do communicate in the sense that their meaning influences electrical brain activity.
