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Iconic Gestures Prime Words
Author(s) -
Yap DeFu,
So WingChee,
Melvin Yap JuMin,
Tan YingQuan,
Teoh RuoLi Serene
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01141.x
Subject(s) - gesture , priming (agriculture) , lexical decision task , psychology , word (group theory) , communication , prime (order theory) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , speech recognition , cognition , computer science , artificial intelligence , mathematics , philosophy , botany , germination , combinatorics , neuroscience , biology
Using a cross‐modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp ). Word targets (e.g., bird ) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words.