The role of prosody and beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information in Mandarin

Both auditory (e.g., prosody) and visual cues (e.g., beat gesture) available in communication are important for listeners to comprehend discourse, given that speech is multimodal. While a vast amount of research has been devoted to investigating the role of prosody in discourse comprehension, it is surprising that relatively little research has been conducted to uncover how visual cues interact with auditory cues given the importance of visual cues in speech processing. This paper examines the roles of prosodic prominence and beat gesture in the memory for discourse information in Mandarin. A dominant role of prosody but not beat gesture was found in facilitating the memory for discourse information. This study contributes significantly to our limited knowledge of multimodal comprehension of focus, and how cues from multilevel sources are integrated.