An examination of the relationship between speech and gesture exploits the fact that gestures are unwitting and sensitive manifestations of speaker-internal thought processes. By looking at the synchrony between modalities, gesture may reveal more about thinking than may be expressed by speech.
Previous models of language production that include gesture have focused on the expression of a singular representation or idea. This project analyzes gesture and speech when multiple construals of an event are simultaneously expressed during deception. Asynchrony between channels is investigated considering both the meanings expressed in each modality as well as the temporal alignment of speech and gesture. In this talk, I argue that gesture and speech remain a unified system even when multiple representations of an event are active in a speaker's mind.