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Hearing people gesticulate when they speak (Kendon, 1972,1980,2000; McNeill, 1985,1992, 2000). This is universally true. The culture has not been found whose hearing members do not spontaneously produce meaningful manual, bodily, and facial movements when speaking with one another.1 Since the 1960s and 1970s, results o f close analyses o f co-occurring verbal and nonverbal behaviors in audio-videotaped natural spoken language have suggested that these behaviors are “two aspects o f the process o f utterance” (Kendon, 1980, p. 207). Research on sign language during the same interval o f decades (Baker & Cokely, 1980; Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Liddell, 1980; Newport & Meier, 1986; Padden & Perlmutter, 1987; Stokoe, 1960; Stokoe, Casterline, & Cronenberg, 1965) has succeeded in demonstrating that language in the manual-visual modality shares with spoken language all o f the dimensions o f patterning necessary to qualify as, “a humanly possible language, [having] universal design features in common with all human languages” (Supalla, 1982, p. 9). Because it appears that gesturing is a natural and ubiquitous part o f language production for hearing speakers, it is reasonable to ask whether deaf signers-somehow analogously-also gesture while signing. Here we consider some ways one may ask this question.
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