This study investigates the contribution of hand gestures to the perception of prominence in naturally occurring stimuli extracted from a multimodal corpus of Maltese conversations. Experiment participants had to rate the prominence of target words in sentences that were presented to them as audiovisual and audio-only stimuli. In half of the stimuli, the target word was accompanied by a co-speech hand gesture. The results of the experiment show that the presence of a co-speech gesture increases the perceived prominence of a target word. How- ever, although seeing the speaker produce the gesture increases the perceived prominence of the co-occurring word, it does not so in a statistically significant way. A post-hoc acoustic analysis of the data showed that on average, prominent words tend to have higher intensity when they are accompanied by gestures than when they are not. The study concludes that gestures may provide an additional but not necessary cue to prominence for the listener.