ABSTRACT
Cognitive psychology does not constitute a unified discipline but is made up of multiple theoretical streams. This chapter is devoted to the models that are proposed in psycholinguistics to include gesture processing in the study of speech production and comprehension. Further developments of models are required to explain why people gesture while speaking and how these bodily movements influence message understanding. Thes chapter distinguishes four general frameworks: an approach based on observation assuming that gestures reveal some contents of thought, a development of information-processing models proposed in psycholinguistics, an alternative based on the dynamical system hypothesis, which questions the idea of input–output symbolic computations and finally in the perspective of pragmatics, the vision of communication as the joint action of two cooperative partners. The hope is to succeed in the proposal of an integrated model and in the relinquishment of the least plausible conceptions.
