The relation between gestures and kinematics

Abstract This chapter reviews fundamental concepts about speech gestures as dynamical systems, presents some new results on their formal expression, and sketches unresolved challenges in the relation between the dynamical approach and open problems in phonological theory. Dynamical systems inherently have discrete, qualitative properties along with continuous, quantitative properties. This naturally sets up two hypotheses for the dynamical view. The first is that the gesture, as a dynamical system, captures the variability and context-specificity of speech movements. The second is that these same dynamical systems also provide a cognitively plausible basis for a theory of phonological representations. The chapter discusses evidence and issues met in fleshing out these two hypotheses and concludes by reviewing progress and outstanding challenges on issues of underspecification and spreading versus feature change.