Gesture size affects numerical estimates in quantifier comprehension.

People think and talk about numerical magnitude in terms of space, and co-speech gestures reflect this, with English speakers using expansive gestures when talking about greater quantities. Existing gestural research on the spatial conceptualization of number has largely looked at gesture production, but we do not know whether gestures can influence the interpretation of imprecise or underspecified numerical expressions such as quantifiers. Looking at the quantifier as a test case, this study investigates the influence of manual inwards-directed (i.

Corrigendum: Pragmatic Prediction in the Processing of Referring Expressions Containing Scalar Quantifiers.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.

Pragmatic Prediction in the Processing of Referring Expressions Containing Scalar Quantifiers.

Previous research in cognitive science and psycholinguistics has shown that language users are able to predict upcoming linguistic input probabilistically, pre-activating material on the basis of cues emerging from different levels of linguistic abstraction, from phonology to semantics. Current evidence suggests that linguistic prediction also operates at the level of pragmatics, where processing is strongly constrained by context. To test a specific theory of contextually-constrained processing, termed here, we used a self-paced reading task where participants were asked to view visual scenes and then read descriptions of those same scenes.

Multimodality and the origin of a novel communication system in face-to-face interaction.

Face-to-face communication is multimodal at its core: it consists of a combination of vocal and visual signalling. However, current evidence suggests that, in the absence of an established communication system, visual signalling, especially in the form of visible gesture, is a more powerful form of communication than vocalization and therefore likely to have played a primary role in the emergence of human language. This argument is based on experimental evidence of how vocal and visual modalities (i.