ABSTRACT
It has currently become commonplace to affirm that in order to communicate face to face, human beings use visible movements – mainly gaze, facial expressions and manual gestures – as well as speech sounds. The number of scientists interested in body language, nonverbal communication or multimodality in discourse is nowadays so large that it has become impossible to present a coherent synthesis of this literature. This chapter explores the domain of gestural communication through the lens of cognitive psychology, by examining the scientific publications of the last 25 years, without neglecting the fact that they have much older roots. The ultimate goal of a cognitive psychology of gestural communication would be to provide a detailed description of the steps going from understanding a question to giving a response, in order to enable engineers to conceive an artificial device as efficient as a human informant.
