Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spoken language often includes ambiguity in meaning.Compounds such as “green teacup” can be interpreted with twodifferent meanings: “green colored teacup” and “cup for greentea.” We can assume there are two different underlyingsyntactic structures. Phonetic aspects have been studied in thedisambiguation process of such ambiguous phrases, but theroles of nonlinguistic information such as gestures have notbeen explored yet. We investigated whether people usegestures differently when they were asked to describe themeanings of Japanese compounds that can be interpreted astwo different meanings. We found that the timing of gesturesin relation to the target words of accompanying speech wasdifferent between right branching compounds and leftbranching compounds. Gestures seem to be used to suggestupcoming two words (adjective and noun) as a unit inbranching. Gestures can be a useful means to disambiguate themeanings of compounds.