Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated the effect of gesture redundancy and speechdisfluency on listeners’ fixations to gestures. Participantswatched a speaker producing a redundant or non-redundantgesture, while producing fluent or disfluent speech. Eyemovements were recorded. Participants spent little time on aspeaker’s gestures regardless of condition. Gestureredundancy and speech disfluency did not affect listeners’percentage dwell time to a speaker’s gestures. However,listeners were more likely to fixate to a speaker’s gestureswhen they expected the gesture to be non-redundant.Listeners were also more likely to fixate to a speaker’sgestures when the speaker was disfluent. Thus, listenersallocate overt visual attention based on the expectedusefulness of a speaker’s gestures, although evidence does notsuggest that they spend more time fixating on these gestures.Furthermore, listeners are sensitive to disfluency in aspeaker’s utterance and change how they attend to gesturesbased on qualities of the speech.