'Hand gestures' performed in the middle of the story affect the hearing and interpretation of words

Some people make gestures when talking, but research has shown that these movements affect the listener.

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2419

Using hand gestures while speaking found to influence how words are heard by others
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-gestures-words-heard.html

The study was conducted by research teams at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry and Linguistics , Radboud University , and Tilburg University .

The team asked the participants to watch various videos with different gestures and asked questions about what they heard. Some of the speakers in the video include those who emphasize only part of the word, such as the 'ob' 'object', and those who make chop-like gestures.

As a result, it was found that the listener emphasizes the syllables combined with the hand gestures. In 20% of the cases, the words in the hand gestures were heard and interpreted better than the other words.

On the other hand, if there is a mismatch between the spoken word and the gesture, the rate of hearing it as a wrong sound has increased by 40%. 'Ga' is a phenomenon that is perceived as a third tone when there is contradictory information between hearing and sight, such as when the voice 'ba' is superimposed on the image in the shape of a mouth, it sounds 'da'. It is called the ' McGurk effect ', but it is thought that the same thing happened with hand gestures .

Although this study was conducted by a Dutch speaker, it is highly likely that similar results will be obtained in other languages.