cospeech

Cospeech, or co-speech, refers to the nonverbal signals that accompany spoken language. These gestures and facial expressions are produced during speech and interact with verbal content to convey meaning, clarify reference, and organize discourse.

Common co-speech gestures include deictic gestures (pointing to referents), iconic gestures (depicting shape, size, or action), and beat gestures (rhythmic hand movements aligned with prosody). Facial expressions and head movements also participate in cospeech.

Function: Co-speech gestures often supplement spoken content. They can convey information not easily stated in words, help disambiguate reference, emphasize points, and improve listener comprehension and memory. They are tightly synchronized with spoken language and appear early in development.

Production and perception: Co-speech gestures arise from integrated neural systems that coordinate language, motor control, and perception. Listeners tend to fuse gestural and verbal information, and mismatches between gesture and speech can hinder understanding.

Development and variation: Children use gestures before developing spoken vocabulary, and gesture use tracks language growth. Gesture patterns vary across cultures and languages, and in sign language communities the role of co-speech gesture is complemented by manual-visual communication.

Clinical and research relevance: Studies of co-speech gesture inform theories of multimodal communication, language development, and disorders such as autism or aphasia, and can inform teaching, therapy, and communication strategies.