In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen showed that listeners used the avatar’s gestures to predict an upcoming speech. Both behavioral and EEG data indicated that hand gestures facilitate language processing, illustrating the multimodal nature of human communication.