Taking action in hand: effects of gesture observation on action verb naming

ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that meaningful gestures in the absence of speech (i.e. pantomimed gestures) influence lexical processing, but, the extent to which pantomimes affect word retrieval is poorly understood. We investigated the relationship between pantomimes and action verb retrieval. Across two experiments, we showed that naming an action picture with a verb was facilitated by the observation of a congruent gesture, relative to both an unrelated gesture and a neutral stimulus which did not differ in their effects. Priming effects were also found to be affected by gesture transparency. This study provides the first demonstration of cross-modal gesture priming of verb retrieval in picture naming. We suggest that facilitation of verb retrieval from pantomimed gestures is consistent with priming at either the semantic level or lexical level.

KEYWORDS:

• Action
• gesture
• priming
• verbs
• naming

Acknowledgments

Ana Murteira was funded by a Macquarie University PhD scholarship (IMQRES15) and supported by the Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University; Lyndsey Nickels was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100102); Paul Sowman was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE130100868 & DP170103148).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lyndsey Nickels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0311-3524

Notes

1 Five pantomimed gestures could be considered as enactments of the real action (clapping, sneezing, saluting, waving and scratching) and, therefore as increased transparency might be expected for these items, correlations were also computed excluding these items: The same pattern of results was observed as for the complete item set.

2 These data were collected as part of another experiment, involving exposure to the same paradigm in two different sessions, one involving neuromodulation, here we report the results of the session without neuromodulation. Although session was counterbalanced across participants, it was nevertheless included in the model to control for any effects of this variable. 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DE130100868, DP170103148]; Australian Research Council Future Fellowship: [Grant Number FT120100102]; Macquarie University PhD scholarship: [Grant Number IMQRES15].