Acknowledgments

The research presented here was funded by a Russian Science Foundation grant (number 14-48-00067) awarded to Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU).

Various key functions of the research were carried out and/or supported by other members of the grant project team, namely Irina Khaleeva, Marija Tomskaja, Jelena Karpenko, and Andrej Petrov. Staff members and students at MSLU also provided valuable support for the research. The project was housed in the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab (known as PoliMod in Russian), directed by Alan Cienki, which comprises part of the Center for Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies (or SCoDiS, http://​scodis​.com​/?q​=en) at MSLU, directed by Olga Iriskhanova.

Camille Debras and Torsten Müller collected the French and German data (respectively) in advance of the grant project period, under the direction of Raymond Becker and Alan Cienki.

Françoise Clotuche Bourdoux and Lena Hotze assisted with the transcription of the French and German video data. Justine Paris, Franziska Boll, and Lena Hotze assisted with conducting the comprehension experiments in France and Germany.

We are grateful to the many participants in the production and comprehension studies who took part in France, Germany, and Russia.

Finally, we wish to thank the anonymous referee for very helpful, detailed comments which led to many improvements, both big and small, throughout the work, and the Human Cognitive Processing series editors, Linda Thornburg and Klaus-Uwe Panther, for their valuable assistance in bringing the volume to production.