Seventeen Ss were videotaped as they provided narrative descriptions of 13 photographs. Judgments from 129 naive untrained Ss were used to isolate 60 speech-related gestures and their lexical affiliates (i.e., the accompanying word or phrase judged as related in meaning) from these 221 narratives. A computer-video interface measured each gesture, and a 3rd group of Ss rated word familiarity of each lexical affiliate. Multiple regression revealed that gesture onset preceded voice onset by an interval whose magnitude was inversely related to the lexical affiliate's rated familiarity. The lexical affiliate's familiarity was also inversely related to gesture duration. Results suggest that difficulty encountered during lexical access affects both gesture and speech. Familiarity's systematic relations with gesture-speech asynchrony and gesture duration make it unlikely that speech and gesture are produced independently by autonomous modules.When people talk they often move one or both hands. Casual observers presume that these arm and hand movements-the gestures that accompany spontaneous speechare related in meaning to what is being said. Yet, despite their ubiquity and the long-standing fascination such behaviors have held for scientists and humanists alike, the functional significance of gesturing for the speaker and the nature of the relation between gesture and speech are far from clear. If speech-related gestures are merely an atavistic vestige of the evolutionary process that resulted in speech (Condillac, 1756(Condillac, / 1974Hewes, 1973;Tylor, 1878) or are essentially random movements that serve to dissipate muscular tension (Dittman & Llewelyn, 1969) and coordinate the speech articulators (Hadar, Steiner, & Rose, 1984), then one should expect that gesture production is essentially independent of the cognitive processes associated with speech.' Such a view is consistent with Fodor's (1983Fodor's ( , 1985 notion of modularity and requires that speech and gesture be produced by autonomous modules. Alternatively, as some have speculated, gesture production and speech production may be interdependent: Gestures may help a speaker retrieve elusive words from memory (De-

In 5 experiments, male and female undergraduates viewed gestures and tried to select the words that originally accompanied them; read interpretations of gestures* meanings and tried to select the words that originally had accompanied them; tried to recognize gestures they previously had seen, presented either with or without the accompanying speech; and assigned gestures and the accompanying speech to semantic categories. On all 4 tasks, performance was better than chance but markedly inferior to performance when words were used as stimuli. Judgments of a gesture's semantic category were determined principally by the accompanying speech rather than gestural form. It is concluded that although gestures can convey some information, they are not richly informative, and the information they convey is largely redundant with speech

2 bottlenosed dolphins proficient in interpreting gesture language signs viewed veridical and degraded gestures via TV without explicit training. In Exp. 1, dolphins immediately understood most gestures: Performance was high throughout degradations successively obscuring the head, torso, arms, and fingers, though deficits occurred for gestures degraded to a point-light display (PLD) of the signer's hands. In Exp. 2, humans of varying gestural fluency saw the PLD and veridical gestures from Exp. 1. Again, performance declined in the PLD condition. Though the dolphin recognized gestures as accurately as fluent humans, effects of the gesture's formational properties were not identical for humans and dolphin. Results suggest that the dolphin uses a network of semantic and gestural representations, that bottom-up processing predominates when the dolphin's short-term memory is taxed, and that recognition is affected by variables germane to grammatical category, short-term memory, and visual perception.

Most violinists believe that instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri "del Gesu" are tonally superior to other violins-and to new violins in particular. Many mechanical and acoustical factors have been proposed to account for this superiority; however, the fundamental premise of tonal superiority has not yet been properly investigated. Player's judgments about a Stradivari's sound may be biased by the violin's extraordinary monetary value and historical importance, but no studies designed to preclude such biasing factors have yet been published. We asked 21 experienced violinists to compare violins by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality new instruments. The resulting preferences were based on the violinists' individual experiences of playing the instruments under double-blind conditions in a room with relatively dry acoustics. We found that (i) the most-preferred violin was new; (ii) the least-preferred was by Stradivari; (iii) there was scant correlation between an instrument's age and monetary value and its perceived quality; and (iv) most players seemed unable to tell whether their most-preferred instrument was new or old. These results present a striking challenge to conventional wisdom. Differences in taste among individual players, along with differences in playing qualities among individual instruments, appear more important than any general differences between new and old violins. Rather than searching for the "secret" of Stradivari, future research might best focused on how violinists evaluate instruments, on which specific playing qualities are most important to them, and on how these qualities relate to measurable attributes of the instruments, whether old or new.tone quality | old Italian sound | subjective evaluation | music | perception

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