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.