Gesture facilitates language production, but there is debate surrounding its exact role. It has
been argued that gestures lighten the load on verbal working memory (VWM; Goldin-
Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001), but gestures have also been argued to aid in
lexical retrieval (Krauss, 1998). In the current study, 50 speakers completed an individual
differences battery that included measures of VWM and lexical retrieval. To elicit gesture,
each speaker described short cartoon clips immediately after viewing. Measures of lexical …

Multimodal discourse requires an assembly of cognitive processes that are uniquely
recruited for language comprehension in social contexts. In this study, we investigated the
role of verbal working memory for the online integration of speech and iconic gestures.
Participants memorized and rehearsed a series of auditorily presented digits in low (one
digit) or high (four digits) memory load conditions. To observe how verbal working memory
load impacts online discourse comprehension, ERPs were recorded while participants …