bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.13.200543. this version posted July 13, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Bosker & Peeters 1 Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear Hans Rutger Bosker ab 1 and David Peeters ac a Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands b Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands c Tilburg University, Department of Communication and Cognition, TiCC, Tilburg, the Netherlands Running title: Beat gestures influence speech perception Word count: 11080 (including all words) Figure count: 2 1 Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 (0)24 3521 373. E-mail address:
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.13.200543. this version posted July 13, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Bosker & Peeters 2 ABSTRACT Beat gestures – spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand – are among the most frequently encountered co-speech gestures in human communication. They are closely temporally aligned to the prosodic characteristics of the speech signal, typically occurring on lexically stressed syllables. Despite their prevalence across speakers of the world’s languages, how beat gestures impact spoken word recognition is unclear. Can these simple ‘flicks of the hand’ influence speech perception? Across six experiments, we demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress (e.g., distinguishing OBject from obJECT), and in turn, can influence what vowels listeners hear.