This study investigated how beat gesture and contrastive pitchaccenting affect online contrastive reference resolution duringspoken discourse comprehension. Evidence from gazefixations indicated that beat gesture encouraged fixations totarget referents of contrastive referring expressions and thatcontrastive accenting encouraged fixations to competitorreferents of non-contrastive referring expressions. Notably,beat gesture and contrastive accenting acted independently,indicating that their effects are additive rather than interactive.Moreover, neither beat gesture nor contrastive accentingaffected an observed tendency to anticipate contrastivereferring expressions. Together, these results provide the firstevidence that beat gesture, like contrastive accenting, isinterpreted as a cue to contrast during online referenceresolution in spoken discourse comprehension.

This study investigated how beat gesture and pitch accentaffect the cognitive load of listeners during languagecomprehension. Evidence from pupillometry and dwell timeindicated that more cognitive resources were required toprocess the combination of these cues than their absence, andthey suggest that beat gesture may have required morecognitive resources to process than pitch accent. Additionally,pupil size positively correlated with reaction time anddecreased as the task progressed, demonstrating its usefulnessas a measure of cognitive processing. These results indicatethat viewing gesture in conjunction with speech may increasecognitive load during language processing, and that thisincreased load may result in enriched representations.