Fill in this form to receive a download link:
In this paper, I compare three different assumptions about the relationship
between speech, thought and gesture. These assumptions have profound conse-
quences for theories about the representations and processing involved in ges-
ture and speech production. I associate these assumptions with three simplified
processing architectures. In the Window Architecture, gesture provides us with
a ‘window into the mind’. In the Language Architecture, properties of language
have an influence on gesture. In the Postcard Architecture, gesture and speech are
planned by a single process to become one multimodal message. The popular
Window Architecture is based on the assumption that gestures come, as it were,
straight out of the mind. I argue that during the creation of overt imagistic
gestures, many processes, especially those related to (a) recipient design, and
(b) effects of language structure, cause an observable gesture to be very different
from the original thought that it expresses. The Language Architecture and the
Postcard Architecture differ from the Window Architecture in that they both
incorporate a central component which plans gesture and speech together, how-
ever they differ from each other in the way they align gesture and speech. The
Postcard Architecture assumes that the process creating a multimodal message
involving both gesture and speech has access to the concepts that are available in
speech, while the Language Architecture relies on interprocess communication
to resolve potential conflicts between the content of gesture and speech.