A spreading-activation model of the semantic coordination of speech and gesture

In naturally occurring speech and gesture, meaning occurs organized and distributed across the modalities in different ways. The underlying cognitive processes are largely unexplored. We propose a model based on activation spreading within dynamically shaped multimodal memories, in which coordination arises from the interplay of visuo-spatial and linguistically shaped representations under given communicative and cognitive resources. An implementation of this model is presented and first simulation results are reported.