Spontaneous gestures are, along with the speech they accompany, a window into the nature of speakers' mental representations and processes (McNeill, 1985, 1987, 1992; Kendon, 1986; Goldin-Meadow et al., 1993). However, there is little consensus among theorists as to the nature of the relationship between speech and gestures, especially representational gestures, i.e., iconics, metaphorics and abstract deictics (Butterworth & Hadar, 1989; McNeill, 1989, 1992; Kita, 1993; Nobe, 1993; Krauss et al., 1996). Models of the mechanisms and processes which produce representational gestures and speech are discussed in this dissertation.; Butterworth & Beattie (1978) reported that the onsets of representational gestures tended to start during silent pauses in fluent phases in spontaneous speech. Butterworth (1989), Butterworth & Hadar (1989) and others claimed that most representational gestures are triggered by phonological lexicon access problems in speaking. The way they presented and interpreted their data has become a largely accepted view for part of the gesture research community.; I disproved this particular misconception. The analyses of our data in which the frequency of gestures was examined revealed that their model left many gestures unexplained. It was reported that acoustic peaks of F{dollar}sb0{dollar} and intensity are closely related to representational gestures' onsets and/or strokes in intonation units (a gesture and acoustic-peak synchrony rule). Moreover, it was reported that the first word subsequent to a silent pause with which a representational gesture onset co-existed tended to have the highest F{dollar}sb0{dollar} and/or intensity peak within its intonation unit. It was argued that when information units are focused upon and salient in the mind of the speaker, it may trigger the production of gestures and thus determine their existence.; A network/threshold model which accommodates other parameters and factors was presented. Therein, several elements of representations were assumed to be linked to each other: linguistic representation, visuo-spatial representation, motor representation. It was claimed that activation patterns in those elements of representations are the origin of representational gestures. A multi-functional view of gestures was supported in that framework.
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