Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide range of modalities that accompany speech. This thesis addresses the particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and meaning. My approach is distinguished in two key respects. First, gestural patterns are leveraged to dis...

Research for which the idea that many basic cognitive processes can be described as fast, parallel, and automatic is reviewed. Memory retrieval/decision processes have often been ignored in the cognitive literature. However, in some cases, computationally complex processes can be replaced with simple passive processes. Cue-dependent retrieval from memory provides a straightforward example of ho...