The relationship between motor activity and language has been further explored in the domain of gesture, with N400 data providing strong evidence that gestures are analyzed and used semantically. N400 effects have been reported for gestures that mismatch a prior spoken word with respect to an object property and those that mismatch an action in a preceding cartoon sequence or spoken sentence (Kelly et al 2004; Wu & Coulson 2005). Moreover, when either of a co-occurring gesture and spoken word was semantically anomalous (versus congruent) with an ongoing spoken sentence context, the resulting N400 effect had the same time course (Ozyurek et al 2007). N400 data thus have demonstrated that body movements can influence ongoing language comprehension almost immediately and in a manner functionally indistinguishable from linguistic inputs.
