Discourse comprehension by oral deaf individuals: the role of spontaneous gestures accompanying discourse.

We assume that spontaneous non-symbolic gestures produced by an actor while proffering an oral discourse favor deep comprehension and learning from discourse in the partner because they favor the construction of an articulated mental model of the discourse. The partner who sees the gestures of the actor, as compared with the partner who does not, will recollect more conceptual information, will draw more on-line inferences, and will recover less easily information at a verbatim level. In a previous study we confirmed these predictions for hearing partners. In the present study we confirm the predictions for oral-deaf partners who access the discourse information through lip-reading.