Judith Holler, Marlijn ter Bekke, Linda Drijvers

In face-to-face communication, recipients need to rapidly integrate a plethora of auditory and visual signals coming from many different bodily articulators. The information in the speech stream may either slow down language processing or result in multimodal facilitation. Our research provides evidence of a multimodal facilitation effect in human communication: participants were faster in shadowing words when seeing multimodal messages compared with only audio. We propose that the multimodal facilitation effect may contribute to the ease of fast face-to-face conversational interaction.