Co-Speech Gesture

This chapter is about the intriguing phenomenon of speech-accompanying gesture. After first describing the general phenomenon and clearly demarcating it from other fields such as sign language and nonverbal communication, I will review some of the central cognitive-psychological literature on gesture from a largely historical perspective. The influential Growth Point theory, presented in McNeill's (1992) landmark publication “Hand and Mind,” put speech-accompanying gesture on the cognitive-psychological map, and introduced a typology that is still used by most gesture researchers today. Growth Point theory has inspired a cognitive architecture for gesture and speech production, the “Sketch model” (De Ruiter, 2000) which extends Levelt's (1989) blueprint of the speaker with gesture production. I discuss two important controversies about co-speech gesture: (a) whether the function of gesture is communicative or internal-facilitatory and (b) whether the relation between gesture and its accompanying speech is complementary or redundant. I will also discuss research about the use of gesture by people with aphasia. Finally, I will briefly discuss an important outstanding open question: how do we create the shape of a gesture from our internal imagery?