Marlijn ter Bekke
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
A groundbreaking study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that hand gestures do more than emphasize speech—they actually help listeners predict what will be said next. Using advanced virtual avatars and a combination of behavioral and EEG data, scientists found that hand movements play a key role in language processing.
Hand Gestures as a Window Into Meaning
In face-to-face conversations, speakers naturally use hand gestures to convey meaning—like mimicking a typing motion when talking about writing or computers. These iconic gestures, which visually represent the spoken content, aren’t just for show. According to the study, listeners actively use these movements to anticipate upcoming words, making communication more efficient and intuitive.
Virtual Avatars and Brain Data Confirm the Connection
To test their theory, the researchers used animated avatars that performed hand gestures while speaking. Participants’ brain activity, measured through EEG, showed enhanced neural responses when gestures were present, indicating that gestures facilitated comprehension. The behavioral data supported this: people understood speech faster and more accurately when meaningful gestures accompanied the audio.
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Human Communication Is Multimodal
This study highlights the multimodal nature of human language. It’s not just about words—we interpret tone, facial expressions, and especially hand movements to understand and predict meaning. These findings could have major implications for improving human-computer interaction, AI communication models, and language learning tools.
We already know that questions produced with iconic gestures get faster responses in conversation”, says first author Marlijn ter Bekke.
Hand movements might speed up language processing because they help to predict what is coming up. “Gestures typically start before their corresponding speech (such as the word “typing”), so they already show some information about what the speaker might say next”, explains Ter Bekke.
To investigate whether listeners use hand gestures to predict upcoming speech, the researchers decided to run two experiments using visual avatars. “We used virtual avatars because we can control precisely what they say and how they move, which is good for drawing conclusions from experiments. At the same time, they look natural.”
