Iconic gesture and speech integration in younger and older adults

This study investigated the impact of age on iconic gesture and speech integration. The performance of a group of older adults (60-76 years) and a group of younger adults (22-30 years) were compared on a task which required the comprehension of information presented in 3 different conditions: verbal only, gesture only, and verbal and gesture combined. The older adults in the study did not benefit as much from multi-modal input as the younger adults and were more likely to ignore gesture when decoding the multi-modal information.