The language of gesture: Testing the multimodality-for-compensation account with head and hand emblems of affirmation and negation.

hypothesis, which posits that multimodal cues are especially beneficial under increased processing difficulty. Across three experiments, participants responded to simple yes-no questions answered by either unimodal, compatible, or incompatible multimodal responses ("yes"/"no" in combination with head nods/shakes and thumbs up/down gestures). The results demonstrated consistent integration effects between verbal and gestural information, with stronger integration effects for affirmative compared with negative responses. The implications of these findings for theories of multimodal language processing are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).