Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

It has been argued that people construct situation models during text reception and that these are analogous, multimodal representations of text grounded in perception and action. On the one hand, abundant evidence has been generated that recipients perceptually simulate features of the situation described in the text. On the other hand, findings…

In this study we investigated whether the beneficial effect of adding illustrations to text can be explained by the fact that illustrations facilitate analogous mental representation construction from text in visuospatial working memory. For this the secondary task paradigm was used. It was expected that the secondary task interfered only with…