Gesture is integral to human language. Its function within human communication is as much goal-directed, and subsequently as communicative, as is speech. Indeed, gesture and speech share the same cognitive, psychological and physiological roots. Although the study of gesture has reached maturity as a branch of scholarship which endorses a multidisciplinary approach to communication, and is now integral to many of the sciences (psychology, psycholinguistics and ethnology, among others), little attention has been paid in recent years to the phenomena involved - the communicative function of gest.