ABSTRACT
This chapter recapitulates the major findings of the study, and discusses the contemporary models of the production of gestures with speech. The lexical gesture process model, the sketch model, the gesture-as-simulated-action framework, the interface hypothesis, the gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis, and the growth-point theory have addressed important issues related to how gestures arise, how gestures are generated to facilitate lexical retrieval, whether the production of gestures is part of the action system or the language system, and how the linguistic and gestural representations interact. These issues are discussed to know whether and to what extent the cross-modal semantic and temporal relationships in Chinese discourse can be accounted for in the various frameworks. The study concludes that language and gesture, when considering form, content, and synchrony, as well as the supplementary neural manifestation, are produced in parallel with interaction in the conceptualization of ideas and the formulation of the production of overt speech and gestures.
