Postcards from the mind

The relationship between speech, imagistic gesture, and thought

Bibliographic Data

ID12824980
AuthorsJan P De Ruiter (0000-0003-2897-8804, Max Planck Society, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume7
Issue1
Pages21-38
Publication date2007-04-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGesture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1568-1475 • E-ISSN: 1569-9773
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/gest.7.1.03rui
OpenAlexW1504128023
LanguageEN
Citations received21

In this paper, I compare three different assumptions about the relationship between speech, thought and gesture. These assumptions have profound consequences for theories about the representations and processing involved in gesture 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, however 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

Gesture · Gesture recognition · Linguistics · Process (computing · Programming language · Speech recognition · Window (computing · Computer Science · Hearing Impairment and Communication · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Architecture · Artificial Intelligence

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