Research has shown a tight temporal relationship between prominence-lending tonal movements in speech and prominence in manual gesture. However, prosodic structure consists of not only prosodic heads (i.e., pitch accentuation) but also of prosodic edges. To our knowledge, no previous studies have assessed the value of prosodic edges (nuclear vs. phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents) as anchoring sites for different types of gestures (i.e., referential vs. non-referential) while at the same time controlling for the relative degree of prominence associated with the pitch accent in an independent manner. A corpus containing over 23 minutes of multimodal speech was analyzed in terms of prosody and gesture. Results showed that while the majority of manual gesture strokes overlapped a pitch-accented syllable (85.99%), apex alignment occurred at relatively low rates (50.4%), and alignment rates did not significantly differ between referential and non-referential gestures. At the phrasal level, crucially our results also showed that strokes align with phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents over nuclear accents, and this relationship is not driven by relative prominence. These findings show that not only prosodic heads, but also prosodic edges (i.e., the first prenuclear pitch accent), are key sites for both referential and non-referential gesture production.