Word familiarity predicts temporal asynchrony of hand gestures and speech.

Seventeen Ss were videotaped as they provided narrative descriptions of 13 photographs. Judgments from 129 naive untrained Ss were used to isolate 60 speech-related gestures and their lexical affiliates (i.e., the accompanying word or phrase judged as related in meaning) from these 221 narratives. A computer-video interface measured each gesture, and a 3rd group of Ss rated word familiarity of each lexical affiliate