Bujok et al. (2025) accepted in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics!
Did you know watching a few beat gestures can change which words you hear minutes later? Read all about it in: “Beating stress: Evidence for recalibration of word stress perception”
Published!
Our new paper “Beating stress: Evidence for recalibration of word stress perception” authored by Ronny Bujok, David Peeters, Antje Meyer, and Hans Rutger Bosker was published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. The full text and all supporting data are publicly available from links at the bottom of this post.
What’s it about?
In this study, we tested if beat gestures could guide speech adaptation, to help you understand a speaker who happens to produce ‘atypical’ acoustic cues to lexical stress. In previous studies, we had found that beat gestures are used as a visual indicator of the position of lexical stress within a word and can thus change our perception of that word in-the-moment (Bujok et al., 2025). For example, hearing the Dutch word /vo:r.na:m/, while seeing a beat gesture on the first syllable biases the listener to perceive VOORnaam with stress on the first syllable (meaning “first name”; rather than voorNAAM with stress on the second syllable, meaning “respectable”). In the now published paper, we decided to investigate if this effect of beat gestures also leads to lasting changes in our perception.
We ran a new experiment in which participants first passively watched a set of short videos. In this ’exposure phase’, participants saw a Dutch speaker who produced ambiguously stressed words (e.g., perceptually in between VOORnaam and voorNAAM). Importantly, one group of participants heard these words paired with a video of the talker consistently producing a beat gesture on the first syllable voor-. This way, we hoped that this group would learn that this speaker happens to produce kinda ‘odd speech’ when intending to produce word-initial stress. The other group of participants heard the exact same speech, but they saw the talker consistently produce a beat gesture on the second syllable -naam. They were expected to learn that this speaker happens to produce ‘odd speech’ when intending to produce word-final stress.
After simply watching 48 of such videos, people were given a new task. In this ’test phase’, people got audio-only speech (no videos, just audio) of the same talker producing words that fell perceptually roughly in between VOORnaam and voorNAAM. Their task was to categorize this ambiguous audio as either having stress on the first or second syllable. Importantly, both groups performed the same audio-only test phase, listening to the exact same speech. Yet our results showed different performance between the two groups. The first group, who had consistently seen a beat gesture on the first syllable in the exposure phase, were more likely to perceive lexical stress on the first syllable in the subsequent audio-only test phase. In contrast, the other group, who had seen beat gestures on the second syllable in the exposure phase, were more likely to perceive the exact same audio as having stress on the second syllable!
Why is this important?
This research shows that beat gestures, the kind of gestures we use the most, can guide speech adaptation and lead to lasting changes in later perception. This is important because speech is infinitely variable: we all speak differently. Dealing with this variability is crucial for successful communication. Our findings help us understand how we are able to use visual cues, such as beat gestures, to solve this variability problem. That is, we can use baet gestures to help us learn about how a given talker tends to speak. Moreover, it highlights speech, and speech learning, is a multimodal phenomenon involving sound, lips, and hands. 👋
Full reference
The full citation, open access PDF, and all data are publicly available from the links below:
(2025). Beating stress: evidence for recalibration of word stress perception. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. doi:10.3758/s13414-025-03088-5.