Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Different language experiences could shape how one looks for information in communication, particularly gesture. In awithin-subjects design, deaf signing (n = 12) and hearing participants (n = 30) watched narratives in four conditions: Ges-ture+Speech without Sound, Gesture+Speech with Sound, No Gesture+Speech without Sound, and No Gesture+Speechwith Sound. Subjects did a forced choice task, choosing between two cartoon vignettes that best matched the narrative.There were Easy and Hard trials.Across conditions, speakers spent less time looking to the Face than signers (=-0.17,p¡0.001), but looked more to Gesturethan signers (=0.18,p¡0.001). For comprehension, we focused on our analyses on the G+S without Sound where wepredicted the two groups would differ. For Hard trials signers performed marginally better than speakers (p =.09). Futurework will explore how these different attention patterns emerge in development.