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In this article I argue that gestures and speech are parts of the same psychological structure and share a computational stage. The argument is based on the very close temporal, semantic, pragmatic, pathological, and developmental parallels between speech and referential and discourse-oriented gestures. Most of the article consists of a description of these parallels. A concept that unites outer speech and gesture is the hypothesis of inner speech.Many cognitive psychologists hold that overt acts of linguistic production are the result of internal "computations." My aim in this article is to make the following point concerning gestures: Gestures share with speech a computational stage; they are, accordingly, parts of the same psychological structure. The metaphor of a shared computational stage captures the processing aspects of speech: that sentences and gestures develop internally together as psychological performances. The metaphor of a common psychological structure captures the idea that speech and gesture respond to the same forces at the same times.Taking into account concurrent gestures suggests that in the dynamic situation underlying sentence generation two opposite kinds of thinking, imagistic and syntactic, are coordinated. The types of gestures that provide this insight are the referential and discourseoriented gestures that spontaneously accom-

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Adults and children spontaneously produce gestures while they speak, and such gestures appear to support and expand on the information communicated by the verbal channel. Little research, however, has been carried out to examine the role played by gesture in the listener's representation of accumulating information. Do listeners attend to the gestures that accompany narrative speech? In what kinds of relationships between gesture and speech do listeners attend to the gestural channel? If listeners do attend to information received in gesture, how is this information represented-is it 'tagged' as originating in the gestural channel? In this article research is described that addresses these questions. Results show that listeners do attend to information conveyed in gesture, when that information supplements or even contradicts the information conveyed by speech. And information received via gesture is available for retelling in speech. These results are taken to demonstrate that gesture is not taken by the listener to be epiphenomenal to the act of speaking, or a simple manual translation of speech. But they also suggest that the information conveyed in a discourse may be represented in a manner that is neither gesture nor language, although accessible to both channels.Pantomime without discourse will leave you nearly tranquil, discourse without gestures will wring tears from you.