Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present studies investigated the degree to which a speaker's nonverbal behavior, specifically eye gaze and hand gesture, influences how people understand and remember indirect requests. In the first study, we examined whether people consider a speaker's eye gaze and/or gesture toward an object in the environment when deciding if a particular utterance is indirect or not. We presented a sequence of short, videotaped scenarios to participants in which two characters produced speech which could potentially be construed as indirect. We found that respondents took nonverbal behavior into consideration when making their judgments. In a second study, we investigated whether nonverbal information intrudes upon people's memory for speech. Results from a cued recall study suggest that nonverbal information is occasionally incorporated into memory for speech.