Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigated how beat gesture and pitch accentaffect the cognitive load of listeners during languagecomprehension. Evidence from pupillometry and dwell timeindicated that more cognitive resources were required toprocess the combination of these cues than their absence, andthey suggest that beat gesture may have required morecognitive resources to process than pitch accent. Additionally,pupil size positively correlated with reaction time anddecreased as the task progressed, demonstrating its usefulnessas a measure of cognitive processing. These results indicatethat viewing gesture in conjunction with speech may increasecognitive load during language processing, and that thisincreased load may result in enriched representations.