Abstract
Someone begins to describe an event and almost immediately her hands start to fly. The movements seem involuntary and indeed unconscious, yet they take place vigorously and abundantly. Why is this happening? Whatever the reason, our person is not alone. Popular beliefs notwithstanding, every culture produces gestures. Gesturing is a phenomenon that passes almost without notice but it is omnipresent. If you watch someone speaking, in almost any language, and under nearly all circumstances, you will see what appears to be a compulsion to move the head, hands and arms in conjunction with speech. Speech, we know, is the actuality of language. But what are these gestures? They are not compensations for missing words or inarticulate speech — if anything, gestures are positively related to fluency and complexity of speech — the more articulate the speech, the more gesture.
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McNeill, D. et al. (2002). Dynamic Imagery in Speech and Gesture. In: Granström, B., House, D., Karlsson, I. (eds) Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2367-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2367-1_3
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