One traditional view of how speech and gesture interact in talk is that gestures represent information, which is largely redundant with respect to the information contained in the speech that they accompany. Other researchers, however, have primarily stressed a complementary interaction of gesture and speech, and yet others have emphasised that gesture and speech interact in a very flexible manner. These discrepant views have crucially different implications with regard to the communicative role of gestures. The study reported here offers a systematic and detailed investigation of this issue to gain further insights into how the two modalities interact in the representation of meaning. The findings support the notion of gesture and speech interacting in a highly flexible manner.