Experimenting Free Choice through palm up gestures and prosody
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0006/000631Keywords:
co-speech gestures, palm up, multimodality, Free Choice, semanticsAbstract
In the present experimental studies, we investigated the interaction of co-speech palm up gestures and prosody in sentences typically triggering free choice (FC) interpretation. Results show that multimodal sentences boost the exclusive interpretation compared to utterances displayed only in the spoken modality, which only received the FC interpretation (inclusive reading). On the basis of this evidence, we suggest that visual cues should more systematically be used as a tool to shed light on linguistic theories, and enrich experimental methods.
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