When humans want to use language to communicate orally with each other, they are faced with a sort of coordination problem. "Avoidance of collision is one obvious ground for this coordination of actions between the participants. In order to communicate efficiently and successfully, they will therefore have to agree to follow certain rules of interaction."¹ One such rule is that no one monopolizes the floor but the participants take turns to speak. This important concept in linguistic interaction is called "turn-taking".

Turn-taking "... is made possible by the cognitive limitations of human beings."² Usually people find it very difficult to talk and to listen simul- taneously and therefore there must be some means of allocating turns so that for some limited period one person alone holds the floor and acts primarily as listener, contributing only briefly to provide support, encouragement, and feedback.

In addition, when a person speaks there is always some movement in the body besides the movements of the jaws and lips that are directly involved in speech production. Movements like bobbing of the head, movements of eyes and eye-brows, or movements of hand and arm, are here referred to as "gestures".

According to KENDON (1983), the word "gesture" here will be taken to mean any visible bodily action by which meaning is given voluntary expression. So, "gesture" is to be considered separate from emotional expression. "For the most part, participants in social interaction have little difficulty in distinguishing actions that are intentional and communicative from those that are not ...".³ In addition to that one can state that gestures are "... intentional, non-componential, symbolic structures: a single gesture represents a single meaning."⁴ It has been said that gestures are an integral part of speaking⁵ and, consequently, they must play a significant role in the turn-taking mechanism.

In this context the tasks of the present study are firstly to discriminate and secondly to visualize gestures used in conversational turn-taking situations.