Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech-accompanying gestures vary depending on features ofthe communicative situation. In the present study, weexamined whether they might also be affected by extraneousactivity in the speaker’s sensorimotor system. We askedparticipants to describe short animations that involved verticalmotion while simultaneously watching a display that depictedvertical motion in either a congruent or an incongruentdirection. Speakers produced gestures depicting verticalmotion at a higher rate when describing the target motionevents when they were simultaneously watching a display thatdepicted motion in the same direction than when watchingmotion in the opposite direction. These results suggest thatthe cognitive basis of gesture lies in the sensorimotor system.