This study investigated how beat gesture and contrastive pitchaccenting affect online contrastive reference resolution duringspoken discourse comprehension. Evidence from gazefixations indicated that beat gesture encouraged fixations totarget referents of contrastive referring expressions and thatcontrastive accenting encouraged fixations to competitorreferents of non-contrastive referring expressions. Notably,beat gesture and contrastive accenting acted independently,indicating that their effects are additive rather than interactive.Moreover, neither beat gesture nor contrastive accentingaffected an observed tendency to anticipate contrastivereferring expressions. Together, these results provide the firstevidence that beat gesture, like contrastive accenting, isinterpreted as a cue to contrast during online referenceresolution in spoken discourse comprehension
