People frequently gesture when a word is on the tip of their tongue (TOT), yet research is mixed as to whether and why gesture aids lexical retrieval. We tested three accounts: the lexical retrieval hypothesis, which predicts that semantically related gestures facilitate successful lexical retrieval; the cognitive load account, which predicts that matching gestures facilitate lexical retrieval only when retrieval is hard, as in the case of a TOT; and the motor movement account, which predicts that any motor (...) movements should support lexical retrieval. In Experiment 1 (a between‐subjects study; N = 90), gesture inhibition, but not neck inhibition, affected TOT resolution but not overall lexical retrieval; participants in the gesture‐inhibited condition resolved fewer TOTs than participants who were allowed to gesture. When participants could gesture, they produced more representational gestures during resolved than unresolved TOTs, a pattern not observed for meaningless motor movements (e.g., beats). However, the effect of gesture inhibition on TOT resolution was not uniform; some participants resolved many TOTs, while others struggled. In Experiment 2 (a within‐subjects study; N = 34), the effect of gesture inhibition was traced to individual differences in verbal, not spatial short‐term memory (STM) span; those with weaker verbal STM resolved fewer TOTs when unable to gesture. This relationship between verbal STM and TOT resolution was not observed when participants were allowed to gesture. Taken together, these results fit the cognitive load account; when lexical retrieval is hard, gesture effectively reduces the cognitive load of TOT resolution for those who find the task especially taxing. (shrink)

In Gesture and Thought he brings together years of this research, arguing that gesturing, an act which has been popularly understood as an accessory to speech, ...

A beneficial effect of gesture on learning has been demonstrated in multiple domains, including mathematics, science, and foreign language vocabulary. However, because gesture is known to co‐vary with other non‐verbal behaviors, including eye gaze and prosody along with face, lip, and body movements, it is possible the beneficial effect of gesture is instead attributable to these other behaviors. We used a computer‐generated animated pedagogical agent to control both verbal and non‐verbal behavior. Children viewed lessons on mathematical equivalence in which an (...) avatar either gestured or did not gesture, while eye gaze, head position, and lip movements remained identical across gesture conditions. Children who observed the gesturing avatar learned more, and they solved problems more quickly. Moreover, those children who learned were more likely to transfer and generalize their knowledge. These findings provide converging evidence that gesture facilitates math learning, and they reveal the potential for using technology to study non‐verbal behavior in controlled experiments. (shrink)

A beneficial effect of gesture on learning has been demonstrated in multiple domains, including mathematics, science, and foreign language vocabulary. However, because gesture is known to co-vary with other non-verbal behaviors, including eye gaze and prosody along with face, lip, and body movements, it is possible the beneficial effect of gesture is instead attributable to these other behaviors. We used a computer-generated animated pedagogical agent to control both verbal and non-verbal behavior. Children viewed lessons on mathematical equivalence in which an (...) avatar either gestured or did not gesture, while eye gaze, head position, and lip movements remained identical across gesture conditions. Children who observed the gesturing avatar learned more, and they solved problems more quickly. Moreover, those children who learned were more likely to transfer and generalize their knowledge. These findings provide converging evidence that gesture facilitates math learning, and they reveal the potential for using technology to study non-verbal behavior in controlled experiments. (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain how (...) they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

Es handelt sich um eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung, die unter der Leitung von Franz Boas, dem Vorstand des Department of Anthropology an der Columbia University, New York, unternommen worden ist.Die Hauptmerkmale des Gebärdenspiels zweier verschiedener sogenannter rassischer Gruppen (Italiener und Juden) sind unter verschiedenen und ähnlichen Umgebungsbedingungen mit Hilfe von Filmaufnahmen untersucht worden. Das Ziel der Untersuchung war, festzustellen :a) ob es hinsichtlich des Gebärdenspiels irgendwelche durchgängigen Gruppenunterschiede zwischen noch nicht amerikanisierten jüdischen und italienischen Schichten gibt, und, falls ja,b) welches Schicksal (...) solche Merkmale unter dem Einfluss der sozialen Anpassung erfahren. — Die Ergebnisse geben auf die erste Frage eine bejahende Antwort : Das Gebärdenspiel beim Gespräch der nicht-assimilierten Italiener und Juden ist recht verschieden, und zwar sowohl hinsichtlich der räumlichen und zeitlichen als auch der sprachtechnischen Gestaltung ihrer Gebärden. Für die zweite Frage zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass die Unterschiede, die bei den noch traditionell gebundenen Gruppen angetroffen wurden, bei ihren amerikanisierten Nachkommen zu verschwinden trachten, deren Gesten untereinander und den angelsächsischen Gruppen angenähert werden. Ferner hat sich herausgestellt, dass der Prozess der Angleichung des Gebärdenspiels entsprechend der sozialen Situation verläuft, in welcher sich der Nachkomme der noch nicht assimilierten Familie befindet.L'article traite d’une enquête de psychologie sociale, entreprise sous la direction de M. Franz Boas, président du Department of Anthropology à l’université de Columbia, New York.Les caractères propres à la mimique de deux groupes, considérés vulgairement comme racialement différents, juifs et italiens, ont été étudiés par le procédé de prises de vue cinématographiques, dans des milieux tantôt semblables, tantôt différents. Le but de l’enquête était : *1° d’établir s’il existait, dans la mimique, des différences spécifiques entre italiens et juifs non encore américanisés ; et, dans le cas d’une réponse affirmative :2° d’étudier ce que devenaient ces différences sous l’action de l’adaptation sociale. Les résultats donnent à la première question une réponse affirmative : la mimique des juifs et des italiens non encore américanisés, dans la conversation, est très différente — différences qui s’expriment aussi bien dans la figuration spaciale et temporelle des gestes que dans la technique du langage. Pour la deuxième question, les résultats montrent que les différences observées sur des groupes cohérents, encore soumis à la tradition, tendent à disparaître dans les générations américanisées ; les gestes s’uniformisent et se rapprochent de ceux des anglo-saxons. D’autre part, il s’est révélé que l’adaptation de la mimique se déroule d’une manière qui varie avec la situation sociale dans laquelle se trouve le descendant d’une famille non encore américanisée. (shrink)

Using a cross‐modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration (...) of gestures was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words. (shrink)

David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an “imagery-language dialectic” that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. In _Gesture and Thought,_ the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the (...) course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought. _Gesture and Thought _is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought. (shrink)

Adults and children spontaneously produce gestures while they speak, and such gestures appear to support and expand on the information communicated by the verbal channel. Little research, however, has been carried out to examine the role played by gesture in the listener's representation of accumulating information. Do listeners attend to the gestures that accompany narrative speech? In what kinds of relationships between gesture and speech do listeners attend to the gestural channel? If listeners do attend to information (...) received in gesture, how is this information represented— is it 'tagged' as originating in the gestural channel? In this article research is described that addresses these questions. Results show that listeners do attend to information conveyed in gesture, when that information supplements or even contradicts the information conveyed by speech. And information received via gesture is available for retelling in speech. These results are taken to demonstrate that gesture is not taken by the listener to be epiphenomenal to the act of speaking, or a simple manual translation of speech. But they also suggest that the information conveyed in a discourse may be represented in a manner that is neither gesture nor language, although accessible to both channels. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, (...) and symbols and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

The article argues in favour of a pragmatist enactive interpretation of the emergence of the symbolic and contentful mind from a basic form of social communicative interaction in which basic cognitive capacities are involved. Through a critical overview of Radical Enactivists (RECers)’ view about language, the article focuses on Mead’s pragmatist behavioural theory of meaning that refers to the gestural conversation as the origin of the evolution of linguistic conversation. The article develops as follows. After exposing the main elements of (...) REC’s theory of cognition and language that involve the construction of a theory of natural signs (teleosemiotics) and basic directionality (Ur-intentionality), some critical points of Hutto and Myin’s proposal will be highlighted. To foster a continuist perspective of language, the behavioural theory of meaning and language that Mead develops from the notion of gesture will be analysed. His theory is akin to REC and could augment the bare bones of REC’s sketched perspective, helping to include Ur-intentionality in a broader non-dualistic phylogenetic and ontogenetic theory of symbolic language from gestural communication, thus helping to overcome the distinction between a content-less intentionality and a content-involving intentionality, i.e., a semantic propositional intentionality. Furthermore, a recent revival of Mead’s theory testifies to its up-to-date relevance to explain the innate social dimension of human and non-human animals, and the human communicative capacity through the conditioning of bio-social canons and structures. (shrink)

The framework of depicting put forward byClark (2016)offers a schematic vantage point from which to examine iconic language use. Confronting the framework with empirical data, we consider some of its key theoretical notions. Crucially, by reconceptualizing the typology of depictions, we identify an overlooked domain in the literature: “speech-embedded nonverbal depictions,” namely cases where meaning is communicated iconically, nonverbally, and without simultaneously co-occurring speech. In addition to contextualizing the phenomenon in relation to existing research, we demonstrate, with examples from American (...) TV talk shows, how such depictions function in real-life language use, offering a brief sketch of their complexities and arguing also for their theoretical significance. (shrink)

The goal of the article is to offer a framework against which relations between gesture and sign can be systematically explored beyond the current literature. It does so by a) reconstructing the history of the discussion in the field of gesture studies, focusing on three leading positions (Kendon, McNeill, Goldin-Meadow); and b) by formulating a position to illustrate how this can be achieved. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for systematic cross-linguistic research on multimodal use of language in its (...) signed and spoken forms. (shrink)

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate (...) the relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture. (shrink)

Using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration (...) of gestures was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words. (shrink)

Speakers of different languages (e.g., English vs. Turkish) show a binary split in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech and co‐speech gesture but not in silent gesture. In this study, we focused on Mandarin Chinese, a language that does not follow the binary split in its expression of motion in speech, and asked whether adult Chinese speakers would follow the language‐specific speech patterns in co‐speech but not silent gesture, thus showing a pattern akin to (...) Turkish and English adult speakers in their description of animated motion events. Our results provided evidence for this pattern, with Chinese—as well as English and Turkish—speakers following language‐specific patterns in speech and co‐speech gesture but not in silent gesture. Our results provide support for the “thinking‐for‐speaking” account, namely that language influences thought only during online, but not offline, production of speech. (shrink)

Gestures is a collection of essays that proposes a daring and ambitious new conception of human behavior. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from different points of view, angles and distances: sometimes he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement like taking a photograph, shaving, or smoking a pipe. Sometimes he pulls back to look at something (...) as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. Holding firmly to basic phenomenological principles – that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that we know others by reference to ourselves, he claims that we constantly “read” states of mind, i.e. thoughts, intentions, emotions, from gestures; still we lack a theory about how this happens. Gestures takes a first step. It offers alternatives to theories by now so veiled by habit and myth that we are hardly conscious of them, and so hardly realize that they are failing. These include the assumption that we can “know” something without being affected by it, the belief that science is value-free, and the common conviction that science and art are fundamentally different activities. (shrink)

Temporal perspectives allow us to place ourselves and temporal events on a timeline, making it easier to conceptualize time. This study investigates how we take different temporal perspectives in our temporal gestures. We asked participants (n = 36) to retell temporal scenarios written in the Moving‐Ego, Moving‐Time, and Time‐Reference‐Point perspectives in spontaneous and encouraged gesture conditions. Participants took temporal perspectives mostly in similar ways regardless of the gesture condition. Perspective comparisons showed that temporal gestures of our participants resonated (...) better with the Ego‐ (i.e., Moving‐Ego and Moving‐Time) versus Time‐Reference‐Point distinction instead of the classical Moving‐Ego versus Moving‐Time contrast. Specifically, participants mostly produced more Moving‐Ego and Time‐Reference‐Point gestures for the corresponding scenarios and speech; however, the Moving‐Time perspective was not adopted more than the others in any condition. Similarly, the Moving‐Time gestures did not favor an axis over the others, whereas Moving‐Ego gestures were mostly sagittal and Time‐Reference‐Point gestures were mostly lateral. These findings suggest that we incorporate temporal perspectives into our temporal gestures to a considerable extent; however, the classical Moving‐Ego and Moving‐Time classification may not hold for temporal gestures. (shrink)

In dynamic theories of presupposition, a trigger pp′ with presupposition p and at-issue component p′ comes with a requirement that p should be entailed by the local context of pp′. We argue that some co-speech gestures should be analyzed within a presuppositional framework, but with a twist: an expression p co-occurring with a co-speech gesture G with content g comes with the requirement that the local context of p should guarantee that p entails g; we call such assertion-dependent presuppositions (...) ‘cosuppositions’. We show that this analysis can be combined with earlier theories of local contexts to account for complex patterns of gesture projection in quantified and in attitudinal contexts, and we compare our account to two potential alternatives: one based on supervaluations, and one, due to Cornelia Ebert, that treats co-speech gestures as supplements. We argue that the latter is correct, but for ‘post-speech’ gestures, rather than for co-speech gestures. (shrink)

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use (...) class='Hi'>gestures that bear some similarities to classifiers. We investigated how accurately hearing adults, who had been learning British Sign Language for 1–3 years, produce and comprehend classifiers in locative and distributive constructions. In a production task, learners of BSL knew that they could use their hands to represent objects, but they had difficulty choosing the same, conventionalized, handshapes as native signers. They were, however, highly accurate at encoding location and orientation information. Learners therefore show the same pattern found in sign-naïve gesturers. In contrast, handshape, orientation, and location were comprehended with equal accuracy, and testing a group of sign-naïve adults showed that they too were able to understand classifiers with higher than chance accuracy. We conclude that adult learners of BSL bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to the tasks of understanding and producing constructions that contain entity classifiers. We speculate that investigating the time course of adult sign language acquisition might shed light on how gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign languages. (shrink)

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent (...) in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence. (shrink)

Speakers frequently perform representational gestures to depict concepts in an iconic fashion. For example, a speaker may hold her index finger and thumb apart to indicate the size of a matchstick. However, the process by which a physical handshape is mentally transformed into abstract spatial information is not well understood. We present a series of experiments that investigate how people decode the physical form of an articulator to derive imaginary geometrical constructs, which we call “gesture form.” We provide quantitative (...) evidence for several key properties that play a role in this process. First, “profiling,” the ability to focus on a structural subunit within the complex form of the physical hand. Second, “perspective,” for which we show that one and the same handshape seen from different perspectives can lead to different spatial interpretations. Third, “selectivity,” the fact that gestures focus on specific spatial features at the expense of others. Our results provide a first step toward mapping out the process of how representational gestures make the communication of spatial information possible. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies. Mirroring this logic, we observe that some metaphoric gestures represent attributes and others represent relations, and propose to call the latter analogical gestures. We provide examples (...) of such analogical gestures and show how they relate to the categories of iconic and metaphoric gestures described previously. Analogical gestures represent different types of relations and different degrees of relational complexity, and sometimes cohere into larger analogical models. Treating analogical gestures as a distinct phenomenon prompts new questions and predictions, and illustrates one way that the study of gesture and the study of analogy can be mutually informative. (shrink)

This paper presents a proposal for the description of gesture phases derived from articulatory characteristics observable in their execution. Based on the results of an explorative study examining the execution of gesture phases of ten German speakers, the paper presents two sets of articulatory features, i.e., distinctive and additional features by which gesture phases are characterized from a context-independent and context-sensitive point of view. It will be shown that gesture phases show a particular distribution of the features, thus distinguishing one (...) phase from another. Furthermore, changes in the execution of phases in linear successions can be described by means of features. Contrary to other accounts, whose focus on gesture phases is primarily in relation to speech and/or adjacent phases, this proposal concentrates on the visible physical characteristics of gesture phases. (shrink)

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that (...) higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)

Empirical studies of gesture in a subject who has lost proprioception and the sense of touch from the neck down show that specific aspects of gesture remain normal despite abnormal motor processes for instrumental movement. The experiments suggest that gesture, as a linguistic phenomenon, is not reducible to instrumental movement. They also support and extend claims made by Merleau-Ponty concerning the relationship between language and cognition. Gesture, as language, contributes to the accomplishment of thought.

Most language learners have difficulties acquiring the phonemes of a second language (L2). Unfortunately, they are often judged on their L2 pronunciation, and segmental inaccuracies contribute to miscommunication. Therefore, we aim to determine how to facilitate phoneme acquisition. Given the close relationship between speech and co-speech gesture, previous work unsurprisingly reports that gestures can benefit language acquisition, e.g., in (L2) word learning. However, gesture studies on L2 phoneme acquisition present contradictory results, implying that both specific properties of gestures (...) and phonemes used in training, and their combination, may be relevant. We investigated the effect of phoneme and gesture complexity on L2 phoneme acquisition. In a production study, Dutch natives received instruction on the pronunciation of two Spanish phonemes, /u/ and /θ/. Both are typically difficult to produce for Dutch natives because their orthographic representation differs between both languages. Moreover, /θ/ is considered more complex than /u/, since the Dutch phoneme inventory contains /u/ but not /θ/. The instruction participants received contained Spanish examples presented either via audio-only, audio-visually without gesture, audio-visually with a simple, pointing gesture, or audio-visually with a more complex, iconic gesture representing the relevant speech articulator(s). Preceding and following training, participants read aloud Spanish sentences containing the target phonemes. In a perception study, Spanish natives rated the target words from the production study on accentedness and comprehensibility. Our results show that combining gesture and speech in L2 phoneme training can lead to significant improvement in L2 phoneme production, but both gesture and phoneme complexity affect successful learning: Significant learning only occurred for the less complex phoneme /u/ after seeing the more complex iconic gesture, whereas for the more complex phoneme /θ/, seeing the more complex gesture actually hindered acquisition. The perception results confirm the production findings and show that items containing /θ/ produced after receiving training with a less complex pointing gesture are considered less foreign-accented and more easily comprehensible as compared to the same items after audio-only training. This shows that gesture can facilitate task performance in L2 phonology acquisition, yet complexity affects whether certain gestures work better for certain phonemes than others. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are (...) ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36). (shrink)

In debates about the proper analysis of demonstrative expressions, ostensive gestures and speaker intentions are often seen as competing for primary importance in securing reference. Underlying some of these debates is the mistaken assumption that ostensive gestures always make the demonstrated object maximally salient to interlocutors. When we abandon this assumption and focus on an object’s mutually-recognized salience itself, rather than on how the object came to be salient, we can work towards a more promising analysis with a (...) uniform treatment of demonstrative reference whether or not there is an ostensive gesture, and whether reference is ordinary or deferred. (shrink)

During face‐to‐face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face‐to‐face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such as co‐speech hand gestures play into these processes of prediction and fast responding. In this corpus study, we found that hand gestures that (...) depict or refer to semantic information started before the corresponding information in speech, which held both for the onset of the gesture as a whole, as well as the onset of the stroke (the most meaningful part of the gesture). This early timing potentially allows listeners to use the gestural information to predict the corresponding semantic information to be conveyed in speech. Moreover, we provided further evidence that questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without gestures. However, we found no evidence for the idea that how much a gesture precedes its lexical affiliate (i.e., its predictive potential) relates to how fast responses were given. The findings presented here highlight the importance of the temporal relation between speech and gesture and help to illuminate the potential mechanisms underpinning multimodal language processing during face‐to‐face conversation. (shrink)

Language and speech depend on a relatively well defined neural circuitry, located predominantly in the left hemisphere. In this article, I discuss the origin of the speech circuit in early humans, as an expansion of an auditory-vocal articulatory network that took place after the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee. I will attempt to converge this perspective with aspects of the Mirror System Hypothesis, particularly those related to the emergence of a meaningful grammar in human communication. Basically, the strengthening of (...) auditory-vocal connectivity via the arcuate fasciculus and related tracts generated an expansion of working memory capacity for vocalizations, that was key for learning complex utterances. This process was concomitant with the development of a robust interface with visual working memory, both in the dorsal and ventral streams of auditory and visual processing. This enabled the bidirectional translation of sequential codes into hierarchical visual representations, through the development of a multimodal interface between both systems. (shrink)

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. (...) The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic. (shrink)

Deficits in gestures act as early signs of impairment in social interaction and communication in children with autism spectrum disorder. However, the pieces of literature on atypical gesture patterns in ASD children are contradictory. This investigation aimed to explore the atypical gesture pattern of ASD children from the dimensions of quantity, communicative function, and integration ability; and its relationship with social ability and adaptive behavior. We used a semi-structured interactive play to evaluate gestures of 33 ASD children and (...) 24 typically developing children. And we evaluated the social ability, adaptive behavior, and productive language of ASD and TD children by using the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System version II and Chinese Communication Development Inventory. No matter the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency of total gestures, behavior regulation gestures, SI gestures, and joint attention gestures of ASD children were lower than that of TD children, as well as the proportion of JA gestures. However, there was no significant group difference in the proportion of BR and SI gestures. Before adjusting for the total score of CCDI, the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration and vocalization/verbalization-integrated gestures in ASD children was lower than that in TD children. However, after matching the total score of CCDI, only the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration was lower. Regardless of the fact that the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency and the proportion of eye-gaze-integrated gestures in ASD children were lower than that in TD children. And the proportion of gestures without eye-gaze integration in ASD children was higher than that in TD children. For ASD children, the social skills score in ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of SI gesture and eye-gaze-integrated gestures; the total score of ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of total gestures and eye-gaze-integrated gestures. In conclusion, ASD children produce fewer gestures and have deficits in JA gestures. The deficiency of integrating eye gaze and gesture is the core deficit of ASD children’s gesture communication. Relatively, ASD children might be capable of integrating vocalization/verbalization into gestures. SI gestures and the ability to integrate gesture and eye gaze are related to social ability. The quantity of gestures and the ability to integrate gesture with eye gaze are related to adaptive behavior.Clinical Trial Registration:www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier ChiCTR1800019679. (shrink)

The tradeoff hypothesis in the speech–gesture relationship claims that (a) when gesturing gets harder, speakers will rely relatively more on speech, and (b) when speaking gets harder, speakers will rely relatively more on gestures. We tested the second part of this hypothesis in an experimental collaborative referring paradigm where pairs of participants (directors and matchers) identified targets to each other from an array visible to both of them. We manipulated two factors known to affect the difficulty of speaking to (...) assess their effects on the gesture rate per 100 words. The first factor, codability, is the ease with which targets can be described. The second factor, repetition, is whether the targets are old or new (having been already described once or twice). We also manipulated a third factor, mutual visibility, because it is known to affect the rate and type of gesture produced. None of the manipulations systematically affected the gesture rate. Our data are thus mostly inconsistent with the tradeoff hypothesis. However, the gesture rate was sensitive to concurrent features of referring expressions, suggesting that gesture parallels aspects of speech. We argue that the redundancy between speech and gesture is communicatively motivated. (shrink)

Speakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way and whether they use space in a contrastive way when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ (...) overall tendency to use the same hand = 13.12, p =.001, 95% CI [.31,.43], d = 2.53) and same location = 7.47, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: = 4.19, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables. (shrink)

This study explores the use of deictic gestures, vocalizations and words compared to content-loaded, or representational gestures and words in children’s early one- and two-element utterances. We analyze the spontaneous production of four children, observed longitudinally from 10–12 to 24–25 months of age, focusing on the components of children’s utterances, the information encoded, and the temporal relationship between gestures and vocalizations or words that were produced in combination. Results indicate that while the gestural and vocal modalities are (...) meaningfully and temporally integrated form the earliest stages, deictic and representational elements are unevenly distributed in the gestural vs. the vocal modality, and in one vs. two-element utterances. The findings suggest that while gestural deixis plays a primary role in allowing children to define and articulate their vocal productions, representational skills appear to be markedly more constrained in the gestural as compared to the vocal modality. (shrink)

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a (...) well‐studied puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving. (shrink)

The communicative behavior of chimpanzees has been cited in support of the hypothesis that language evolved from gesture. In this commentary, I compare gestural and vocal communication in wild chimpanzees. Because the use of gesture in wild chimpanzees is limited, whereas their vocal behavior is relatively complex, I argue that wild chimpanzee behavior fails to support the gestural origins hypothesis.