Gestures influence the way our brains process grammar

Our hands may do more than complement what we say. They can also help our brains process grammar. In a new neuroimaging study published in PNAS, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen show that gestures can make it easier to process negative sentences ("I did not sleep"), providing the first neurocognitive evidence that gestures influence grammatical processing.