Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is known that phrases and sentences can be interpreted to have multiple meanings. Previous studies have focused mostlyon prosodic cues and pauses in the disambiguation mechanism of syntactic structures. In this study, we looked into thedisambiguation effects of gestures (iconic or beat) and three different duration of pauses (0.1, 0.5, 1.0 sec) at critical wordfor branching. The participants looked at a computer monitor that showed an actor doing gesture, and two pictures thatdepict different meanings. The participant was asked to choose the matched picture with the shown gesture. Reactiontime was also measured. The result was that participants responded more correctly when gesture of sequential chunkingwas shown than non-sequential chunking. More pause facilitated interpretation of the non-sequential stimulus, whereasmore pause facilitated the reaction for the sequential chunking stimulus. The study showed the importance of chunkingsyntactic information shown by gesture and pause.