Idiogests: Gestural Idiolects Reveal Variation in Discursive Focus

This paper discusses a particular kind of gestural interspeaker variation, revealing the individual speaker's "gestural idiolects", which we term idiogests. While partly attributable to ad hoc individual preferences and style, our data show that these idiogests are also indicative of a certain semantic focus or perspective that the speaker takes on the scene and maintains throughout the discourse. Our study is based on elicited picture descriptions by L1 speakers of Belgian Dutch.