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In this article I argue that gestures and speech are parts of the same psychological structure and share a computational stage. The argument is based on the very close temporal, semantic, pragmatic, pathological, and developmental parallels between speech and referential and discourse-oriented gestures. Most of the article consists of a description of these parallels. A concept that unites outer speech and gesture is the hypothesis of inner speech.Many cognitive psychologists hold that overt acts of linguistic production are the result of internal "computations." My aim in this article is to make the following point concerning gestures: Gestures share with speech a computational stage; they are, accordingly, parts of the same psychological structure. The metaphor of a shared computational stage captures the processing aspects of speech: that sentences and gestures develop internally together as psychological performances. The metaphor of a common psychological structure captures the idea that speech and gesture respond to the same forces at the same times.Taking into account concurrent gestures suggests that in the dynamic situation underlying sentence generation two opposite kinds of thinking, imagistic and syntactic, are coordinated. The types of gestures that provide this insight are the referential and discourseoriented gestures that spontaneously accom-

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