How sensitive are Italian speakers to information provided by co-speech gestures when interpreting ambiguous motion events? Verb + particle constructions are not suitable for expressing telic motion (change of location across a spatial boundary) in verb-framed languages like Italian. However, this constraint may perhaps be disregarded with certain type of manner verbs + complex PPs. The reading often depends on contextual inference or pragmatic clues. We present two experimental judgment tasks in which we first test whether grammatically locative Italian verb + particle constructions can be interpreted as boundary-crossing motion and secondly we investigate the effect of gestural information on the same type of locative events. The study confirms the existence of boundary-crossing interpretations for certain types of Italian manner verb + PP constructions, but more importantly that co-speech gestures can change the reading of events and thus override default meaning expressed only in speech.
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