Dual viewpoint gestures

This paper examines gestures that simultaneously express multiple physical perspectives, known as dual viewpoint gestures. These gestures were first discussed in McNeill’s 1992 book, Hand and mind . We examine a corpus of approximately fifteen hours of narrative data, and use these data to extend McNeill’s observations about the different possibilities for combining viewpoints. We also show that a phenomenon thought to be present only in the narrations of children is present in the narrations of adults. We discuss the significance of these gestures for theories of speech-gesture integration.