Susanne Fuchs, holder of the ILCB / Iméra Chair in Language, Communication and the Brain for 2024–2025, took part in an international study examining the impact of coordination between gestural, verbal and prosodic elements, published in Language and Cognition on October 7th, 2026.
The Next Wednesday Question (NWQ)
In English, asking the question ‘Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, on what day is it now?’ has two possible answers, with past research suggesting that about half of all people respond ‘Monday’, and about half respond ‘Friday’. The ambiguity arises because of the adverb forward that can either be interpreted from two perspectives, either ‘We are approaching the meeting’, or ‘The meeting is approaching us’.
Previous research has shown that the ambiguity of the NWQ can be partially resolved by gesture. When the speaker gestures away from themselves, the proportion of ‘Friday’ responses increases, compared to gesturing toward themselves. Knowing this, Susanne Fuchs and her colleagues hypothesised that the question was no longer whether gesture matters in this task, but when and where gesture was integrated with speech.
They studied how the coordination of gestural, verbal and prosodic elements impacted semantic integration, and ultimately ambiguity resolution. Ultimately, across their three experiments, they discovered that disambiguation was strongest when gestures coordinate with the adverb ‘forward’ as opposed to the verb ‘moved’.
Citation: Gregori A, Fuchs S, Winter B. “Moving meetings by moving gesture and prosody”. Language and Cognition. 2026;18:e62. doi:10.1017/langcog.2026.10114
