SS26: Language and Gesture

Seminar Description

Contemporary research increasingly conceptualizes language and gesture as components of a unified communicative and cognitive system, challenging the view of gesture as merely ancillary to speech. This seminar examines theoretical and experimental approaches to speech–gesture integration, focusing on how multimodal cues contribute to the meaning of utterances. Specifically, we will explore how iconic, metaphoric, beat, and deictic gestures differentially influence semantic processing and what these findings imply for theories of language comprehension.