Previous studies using cross-modal semantic priming have found that
iconic gestures prime target words that are related with the gestures. In the
present study, two analogous experiments examined this priming effect
presenting prime and targets in high synchrony. In Experiment 1,
participants performed an auditory primed lexical decision task where
target words (e.g., “push”) and pseudowords had to be discriminated,
primed by overlapping iconic gestures that could be semantically related
(e.g., moving both hands forward) or not with the words. Experiment 2 was
similar but with both gestures and words presented visually. The
grammatical category of the words was also manipulated: they were nouns
and verbs. It was found that words related to gestures were recognized faster
and with fewer errors than the unrelated ones in both experiments and
similarly for both types of words.
