Abstract
It has been claimed that the linguistically dominant (left) hemisphere is obligatorily involved in production of spontaneous speech-accompanying gestures ( Kimura, 1973a, 1973b; Lavergne and Kimura, 1987). We examined this claim for the gestures that are based on spatial imagery: iconic gestures with observer viewpoint ( McNeill, 1992) and abstract deictic gestures ( McNeill, et al. 1993). We observed gesture production in three patients with complete section of the corpus callosum in commissurotomy or callosotomy (two with left-hemisphere language, and one with bilaterally represented language) and nine healthy control participants. All three patients produced spatial-imagery gestures with the left-hand as well as with the right-hand. However, unlike healthy controls and the split-brain patient with bilaterally represented language, the two patients with left-hemispheric language dominance coordinated speech and spatial-imagery gestures more poorly in the left-hand than in the right-hand. It is concluded that the linguistically non-dominant (right) hemisphere alone can generate co-speech gestures based on spatial imagery, just as the left-hemisphere can.
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