The role of task in the interaction between gestures' and words' meaning

This study aims to verify whether the priming effect of gesture on same meaning words is modulated by the activation of different types of information in words. The priming gestures’ meanings prompt visuo-spatial information yielding a pictorial semantic context for the meaning of the target words. The meaning of the target words can be activated through different types of information depending on the task. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence was collected in a lexical decision and image formation task. The behavioral data showed a priming effect of the meaning of gesture in both the tasks. The electrophysiological data confirmed this result showing a significant larger N400 during the lexical decision task. In the image formation task we found a N300 effect modulated by gestures’ meaning. The early flexible integration of gestures’ and words’ meaning seems to depend on the type of information elicited in the target words by the task.