Introduction

The overarching problem I address in this chapter is the real-time interaction of speaking and thinking during discourse. Specifically, I use the gestures that co-occur with speech as a way of accessing visual thinking tied to speaking, and with this resource investigate the interaction of speaking and thinking as they are taking place. The theoretical concept with which I propose to picture the nexus of thinking and speaking is the ‘growth point’ – a concept referring to the primitive form, psychologically, from which the full utterance is claimed to emerge. The growth point is a theoretical entity with defined properties that predict empirical data. These data, if observed, serve to confirm the hypothesis.

I have organized the chapter as follows. First, I briefly explain the nature of gestures and how they can be taken as real-time windows on the mind, specifically on visual thinking processes. Secondly, I explain the concept of a growth point itself, and I present some gesture data that illustrate this concept and take into account the interlingual comparisons promised in my title. Thirdly, I describe a type of experiment that might be carried out to test a prediction of the growth-point hypothesis. Fourthly, I sketch how the production of an utterance could proceed from a growth point. And finally, I relate this microgenetic process to the concept of a dialectic, as presented originally in Vygotsky (1987).