Cohesion and gesture

Abstract Discourse cohesion is viewed from the perspective of a speech/gesture synthesis. Based on narrative and conversational data, we present cross‐cultural evidence of cohesive elements marked by repetitive gestures that maintain continuity with respect to their location in space, the hand with which they are produced, and/or their form. The data show the joint contribution made by speech and gesture to the process of creating and maintaining discourse topics. It is claimed that an approach to discourse that focuses on events taking place at the moment of speaking, unlike approaches that assume the prior existence of planned discourse units, can account for the impact of speech and gesture on thought; for example, the execution of a gesture helps the speaker to track presupposed background information, and so provides a basis for the production of the communicatively dynamic part of an utterance. The proposed model of discourse production is a dialectic, in which gesture and speech provide interacting voices, and the relationship between the voices moves the discourse forward.