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Gesture

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Gesture is intimately entwined with human language and thought. It is a tool for communication as well as cognition: conveying information to interlocutors, orchestrating interaction, and supporting problem-solving and learning. Over the past 25 years, the community of scholars interested in gesture has grown from a specialized group to a multidisciplinary community incorporating gesture into a wide range of topics. Erica Cartmill discusses the most intriguing findings and questions in gesture research.

Image courtesy of interviewee. April 24, 2024

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This video video is a transcript of a discussion about gesture studies, emphasizing the speaker's background, ongoing research, and the relationship between gesture and language. The speaker clarifies that they have not yet written a book, although they have extensively researched gestures, particularly in adults, children, and great apes.

Key points include:

1. **Definitions of Gesture**: Gesture is defined as movements of the hands, arms, and head that occur in the context of conversation. The definition varies depending on the context, especially when considering non-verbal animals like great apes and very young children who may use gestures in lieu of speech.

2. **Intentionality in Gestures**: The speaker discusses how to determine intentionality behind gestures, which involves observing whether gestures are directed towards others and if there is an expectation of response.

3. **Types of Gestures**: Different types of gestures are described:
- **Representational Gestures**: Where the movement resembles the object it references (e.g., mimicking holding a cup).
- **Conventional Gestures**: Symbolic gestures agreed upon by a community (e.g., a thumbs-up).

4. **Interaction Between Gesture and Speech**: The relationship is described as intertwined, with gestures enhancing, disambiguating, or complementing speech. Evidence shows when one system fails, the other often does too.

5. **Gestures in Learning**: Gestures are not only for communication but also aid in cognitive processes and problem-solving for learners. They help in memory retention and can enhance understanding.

6. **Evolution of Gesture and Language**: The speaker suggests that earlier forms of language may have evolved through gestures before the development of spoken language and posits that gestures may have been the primary mode of communication in early human ancestors.

Overall, the discussion outlines the significance of gestures in communication, cognition, and language evolution, while highlighting the differences in gestural use across species and ages.

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So it's not a book.

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I haven't written a book yet.

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Um, so I think that that maybe the, I mean,

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I've written several pieces on gesture.

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Um, I mean, it's something I've studied in my, you know,

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in my lab for a while,

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something I worked on in my postdoc as well as my PhD.

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Um, but I haven't written a book like manuscript yet.

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So I don't know if you wanna like,

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change the introduction a little bit.

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You could just say, my work jester is broadly.

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Uh, so the field

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of gesture studies has actually grown quite a bit over the

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last maybe 20 years.

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And it really depends.

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The precise definition of gesture really depends on

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who you're talking to.

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Um, there's sort of different schools

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of thought when it comes to thinking about gesture.

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I like to have to take a definition of gesture that

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is movements of the hand and arms

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and head, that occurred

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during the course of conversation.

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So it's, that is a, I think a pretty good definition,

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a pretty encompassing definition of what we refer to

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as Coe gesture.

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So these are our gestures that occur within the context

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of speech or surrounding speech,

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which works really well if you're studying the,

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the hand movements

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and bodily communication of adults and of humans.

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Um, but I also work with children

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and I work with great apes,

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and I think there that definition doesn't work

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as well with great apes.

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They're not speaking, but they still use gesture.

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And with very young children, gestures might take the place

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of speech rather than accompany speech.

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So it's, I think when you're working on with gesture,

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when you're studying gesture,

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but you're studying it in creatures outside of adult humans,

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then you need to, to take a slightly different definition.

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So, for example, with children,

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it might not be that gestures are cos speech, right?

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Which imply that that gestures

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and speech are coming together.

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Instead, it might be that children are communicating to,

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to say an adult or to another child.

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And it might be that they're using vocalizations as well

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as gestures, but they're not using speech per se.

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It depends on the age of the child.

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Well, with great apes, which a lot

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of my work has really focused on the great apes,

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chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans,

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and humans we're also a great ape,

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but the non-human great apes.

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Um, when it comes to looking at gesture there, we have

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to again, sort of go back to the drawing board

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and think, okay, what does it mean to use gesture

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when you don't have a spoken language?

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So apes are, use a lot of gesture

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to communicate with one another.

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Um, but they're doing it not within the context

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of a conversation or

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with a spoken conversation. They're doing

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It,

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where gesture is often the primary medium of communication.

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And so there we use a set of, of criteria

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looking for evidence of intentionality.

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So where they intending to communicate.

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And there we're actually u sort of borrowing

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and modifying, criteria from

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early child communication, right?

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You have the same problem if you're studying a 1-year-old

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or you're studying an orangutan,

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and we don't know, sort of what movements they're making

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with their body are communicative

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and which ones are not, right?

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So it's, you have

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to really use evidence from the interaction to argue

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that the movement that they're making is

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not accidental, right?

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They don't just go shoo,

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or, you know, they're not just shooing away a bug.

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They're actually waving to get attention.

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And so the way that you do that is to look for evidence

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that they are intending to communicate.

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And so this is sort of brings in all of this philosophy, all

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of these, you know, it's a, it's a big question, right?

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How do you measure intention?

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And, you know, that's probably longer than we have today.

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But just in brief, what, what we use as,

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as evidence for intentionality is that,

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a gesture is directed towards another individual.

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So if I'm waving my hand,

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I'm gonna be focused towards you when I do it.

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That, there's expectation of a response

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and evidence for that can be several different directions.

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So it could be that I wait for a response, so I face you,

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I wave my hand and that I wait.

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Or it could be I face you, I wave my hand.

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If you don't respond, then I persist.

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I keep communicating and I change the way I communicate.

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So I might slow down, you know, I go from hey to,

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or I might change to a different, to a different signal.

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So I might start with, you know, waving my hand

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and then clap to get your attention, wave bigger,

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wave both hands, something like that.

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So you're seeing this, this persistence and this elaboration

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or escalation of the signal and waiting for a response.

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So there's, there's evidence that I'm communicating

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to a particular individual.

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I am doing it with an expectation

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of getting a particular kind of response.

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And so that's what we use as evidence and intentionality.

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So, so representational gestures really

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refer more to the, the kinds of gestures where,

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they, they have meaning through the movements that they're,

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that you're making with your hands, rather than,

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than, through the thing that you're gesturing to.

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So for example, you know, if I hold up a cup

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and I point to the cup, we describe

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that as a dy dick gesture.

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It can also have a diic gesture

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of just holding something up, right?

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It's directing attention to something.

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And we typically don't describe those

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as representational gestures

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because the meaning is

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anchored in the object itself rather than in the gesture.

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The gesture is just directing attention towards that.

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Um, representational gestures would encompass things like

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iconic gestures where the movement of the jester resembles

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the, the reference.

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So for example, with cup, I could use my hands

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to show the shape of the cup,

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or I could hold an imaginary cup, right?

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So it could be I'm holding like more of a glass of water,

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or I'm holding a mug

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and I could, you know, pretend to drink out of it,

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or I could trace, you know, the circle

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and the, the handle of the mug

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that would be representing the object through,

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similarity in form.

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And sometimes in function, if I'm illustrating the function,

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now, ity can be quite complicated.

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So it seems really simple.

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You look at it and you're like, the movements

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that you're making map onto the thing that, that you mean.

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But there's actually, evidence that, that ity can is,

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is more complicated for children and for apes.

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So for adults, we see something just like playing charades.

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It's like, you're acting something out.

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I get that, that your movement is,

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is representing something else, right?

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It's a representational gesture.

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Um, but for, for young chil very young children,

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and for apes, it can be more complicated

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because you have to, you have to understand what features

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of the movement are important,

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and you have to understand the analogy

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between those features of the movement

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and the features of the real world.

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For example, if I was going to to, to, you know,

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gesture about a tree, I could have, you know, the trunk,

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I could gesture the branches,

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I could gesture the tree waving in the wind.

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I could gesture about all the leaves.

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I could do a, you know, a palm tree versus a big oak.

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Um, there, you know, I could talk about climbing the tree.

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And within, within a conversational context, it's,

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it can really make a lot of sense, right?

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It can be very helpful. Um, representational gestures can,

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can kind of provide a lot of quality

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and depth to, you know, if I just say tree, you don't know

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what kind of tree I'm talking about, but if I gesture about

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the tree, you learn something about it.

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Its size, its shape, its placement, how it moves

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the relationship I have to it, you know, is it over there?

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Is it over here? Is it big? Is it small?

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Am I in the tree itself? Is the, am i under the tree?

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Um, and so, so representational gestures can provide all of

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that richness, but if you just have one in isolation,

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it can be pretty, it's a pretty difficult task actually, to,

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to figure out what parts of the gesture are, are mapping on

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to the thing in the real world.

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So the, the example of the tree i

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that I gave was really about iconic gesture.

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It's where the, the movement of the hands

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maps onto the features

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of something in the, in the real world.

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There's another set of, of gestures which are, are referred

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to either as conventional gestures

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or sometimes as emblems, where they're really symbolic.

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And so there, the, the form

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of the gesture doesn't resemble

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the thing that it stands for.

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It it only means that thing

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because we as a community agree that it does.

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So the community can be the entire world,

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or the community can be, you know, a city or a family

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or even just one person, right?

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So you can have a secret handshake, say with a friend

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or a secret, you know, hand symbol

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that you agree means something

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and outside, you know, people who looking from the

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outside wouldn't understand that.

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And so we do see that those kinds of gestures can vary.

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You know, they vary cross-culturally,

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they're actually more similar across cultures than,

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than you would expect given that, that they have to sort of,

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they have this meaning

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because people agree that they mean something, you know,

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but think about, you know, the thumbs up gesture.

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Okay? Um, things like that.

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Uh, one of my, my favorite gestures is,

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so I lived in Poland for a few years,

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and one of my favorite gestures there is this, you know,

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like tap, tap of the neck.

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And I, like in the US I it, when I ask, say,

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students in the classroom, what do you think this means?

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And they'll say like, cut it

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out, or something like that.

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In Poland, at least in the part of Poland

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where I lived, it means drunk.

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Like you're filled up to here.

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Like, they were really drunk.

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And you also think about the kinds of rude gestures.

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I'm not gonna do them here, but those I think are really

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nice examples of these symbolic conventional gestures

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that vary from place to place.

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So, to come, to come back to your question about,

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about how jester works with speech.

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So there are, there are different ways

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of thinking about the relationship between JE and speech.

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Um, you know, I think that maybe the,

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the most comprehensive one is to simply say that

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that gesture and speech together form a unified system.

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So there's really good evidence that there's a tight,

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deep rooted relationship between gesture and speech.

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It's not just that we speak and we gesture

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and we, we happen to do both at the same time, right?

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They really, they, they are,

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sometimes I say intimately entwined, right?

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They're really tightly integrated.

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Um, if you prevent people from gesturing,

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say if you have them sit on their hands or,

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or, you put their hands in gloves

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and you velcro them to a table, you'll see

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that their speech will show more disfluencies.

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So they'll say, and,

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they'll have a harder time recalling words

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And, and they won't speak as fluently

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and they won't speak as long.

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And, you see the same thing happen when you

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restrict, speech.

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So in the case of stuttering,

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there's really nice evidence from

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researchers working on stuttering that

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during stuttering gesture is also interrupted.

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So if they were separate systems, then you would expect

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that if one system fails, the other system would take over.

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There's actually evidence that when one system is impaired,

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it, the other system is also impaired.

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And so, you know, there, there's evidence from that.

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There's evidence from neuroimaging, and,

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and EEG, that, that there is actually, sort

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of simultaneous processing of both speech and of jester.

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And so I think one of the things that's really interesting

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about jester is that it's part of language,

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but it's different than speech.

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So speech has really specific rules, you know,

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different rules depending on the language that you speak,

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but every, every language has rules, has grammatical rules,

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that, you know, that really tightly constrain,

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speech and in a way that, that some things are grammatical,

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some things are not grammatical, you know, and,

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and it's, it's much easier to sort of predict,

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what is allowable in speech than

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what is allowable in gesture,

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because gesture is much more wide open.

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And so gesture almost has sort of an analog.

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If you think about speech as being more digital,

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one thing at a time in a row, following rules,

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gesture allows us

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to communicate in a more analog holistic manner.

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Um, it it providing different information

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from what's happening in speech.

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And so gesture can reinforce what's happening in speech.

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It can disambiguate what's happening in speech, you know,

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so if I say, I want that one.

13:45.155 --> 13:46.575
If I just say, I want that one,

13:47.535 --> 13:48.795
who the heck knows what that is?

13:48.965 --> 13:52.355
Right? Almost always when we use something like this

13:52.455 --> 13:55.275
or that here or there in speech, we're gesturing.

13:56.325 --> 13:58.065
And so you can disambiguate

13:58.065 --> 13:59.145
what's what you're saying in speech.

13:59.525 --> 14:01.905
You can also add to what you're saying in speech.

14:02.165 --> 14:03.425
So sometimes what gesture,

14:03.765 --> 14:07.585
the information gesture is providing is complimentary,

14:07.645 --> 14:09.985
but different from the information in speech.

14:10.525 --> 14:13.345
And so thinking about those relationships,

14:13.565 --> 14:15.105
and what information is being

14:15.545 --> 14:17.265
provided in speech, what information is being

14:17.505 --> 14:18.865
provided in gesture and,

14:19.085 --> 14:23.825
and, how the, the sum of both of those modalities

14:24.355 --> 14:27.025
gives a fuller pitch picture of communication.

14:27.525 --> 14:29.945
Um, you know, I think is a very interesting question.

14:30.835 --> 14:31.955
I think I'm maybe gonna talk more

14:31.955 --> 14:33.075
about the evolution of language.

14:33.235 --> 14:34.475
'cause that's what I work on.

14:34.615 --> 14:36.235
Um, I don't really work on gesture and learning,

14:36.475 --> 14:37.755
although there's beautiful research on that.

14:38.535 --> 14:43.165
Um, so I think there's some really nice evidence

14:43.595 --> 14:48.285
that that learners who are approaching new problems,

14:48.745 --> 14:50.885
can use their gestures in ways

14:51.115 --> 14:53.725
that help them understand a problem better.

14:54.265 --> 14:56.725
So, it was off, there's a great body

14:56.725 --> 15:00.205
of literature on gesture for thinking as well

15:00.205 --> 15:01.445
as gesture for communication.

15:01.745 --> 15:03.485
And so a lot of the things that we do

15:03.485 --> 15:05.845
with our hands while we're talking are not just

15:05.865 --> 15:08.965
for communicating to other people, they're also for us.

15:09.665 --> 15:12.845
And so by putting, you're almost putting ideas out there

15:12.945 --> 15:15.485
and then returning to them, you, you know,

15:15.485 --> 15:17.725
you can draw things just as you were,

15:17.725 --> 15:19.645
as if you were sketching something on paper.

15:19.745 --> 15:21.125
You can draw things with your hands,

15:21.585 --> 15:23.045
you can think you can rotate them,

15:23.065 --> 15:24.565
you can think about them in different ways.

15:24.745 --> 15:28.085
It provides an opportunity to externalize some

15:28.205 --> 15:29.805
of our internal thought processes.

15:30.425 --> 15:33.685
And, and there's, you know, there's evidence from,

15:33.955 --> 15:37.685
from experimental work that shows that that actually helps

15:38.195 --> 15:40.765
with learning certain kinds of problems with working

15:40.765 --> 15:44.165
through more difficult problems, even if you understand,

15:44.465 --> 15:46.685
you know, sort of a basic level of a problem.

15:47.385 --> 15:51.965
And with, with helping in memory tasks so you're, can,

15:52.145 --> 15:54.925
can be a resource to support what we call working memory

15:55.705 --> 15:57.725
is the kind of memory that you need when you're say,

15:58.125 --> 16:00.325
remembering how to answer a question someone just asks.

16:00.825 --> 16:04.845
So, so, we know that

16:05.035 --> 16:06.045
that gestures

16:06.075 --> 16:08.765
that learners themselves make can help them learn.

16:09.305 --> 16:12.165
We also know that learners are sensitive to the gestures

16:12.165 --> 16:13.205
that instructors make.

16:13.665 --> 16:18.445
And so there are people working on, on trying to,

16:18.625 --> 16:21.645
to design better, better lessons

16:22.235 --> 16:26.365
that involve gesture as one, as one possible visual aid.

16:28.265 --> 16:31.445
And then coming to the question of gesture in the evolution

16:31.445 --> 16:34.325
of language, this is, possibly my favorite question.

16:34.385 --> 16:36.205
So I work on the evolution of language

16:36.345 --> 16:38.445
and on je, so I love the intersection of these.

16:38.945 --> 16:43.165
Um, there's, there are theories

16:43.165 --> 16:47.005
that jester actually played a much bigger role early in,

16:47.005 --> 16:48.365
earlier in human evolution.

16:48.585 --> 16:52.525
So when we look at the, at the existing great apes,

16:52.825 --> 16:56.005
humans, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos,

16:56.005 --> 16:57.845
and gorillas, all of them jester

16:58.355 --> 17:00.445
only humans have spoken language,

17:01.545 --> 17:04.645
but, the other apes have vocalizations,

17:04.945 --> 17:08.005
but their gestures seem to, to be more similar

17:08.065 --> 17:10.285
to human gesture than their vocalizations are

17:10.285 --> 17:11.405
similar to human speech.

17:12.345 --> 17:16.605
And so one possibility is that the, the gestural

17:17.445 --> 17:20.805
communication of our last common ancestor we're talking 12,

17:21.125 --> 17:24.325
13 million years ago, that for that species

17:25.565 --> 17:29.125
jester was really, sort of the most important modality.

17:29.665 --> 17:33.605
And that, as you know, as the great apes evolved to,

17:33.825 --> 17:37.405
you know, to the present era, je stayed really important.

17:37.945 --> 17:42.725
And that when, when humans and chimpanzees and bonobos,

17:43.465 --> 17:46.605
and the lineages that led to chimpanzees

17:46.605 --> 17:47.765
and bonobos on the one hand,

17:47.825 --> 17:48.965
and to humans on the other hand,

17:49.235 --> 17:52.805
when those lineages diverged, about, you know, a,

17:52.885 --> 17:57.285
a few million years ago, that jester

17:57.825 --> 18:00.405
was, was the most important modality

18:00.905 --> 18:02.885
for our last common ancestor.

18:03.185 --> 18:06.525
So if jester was fact the most important modality,

18:07.885 --> 18:10.535
then it could be the case that

18:11.855 --> 18:13.975
language actually evolved first within

18:14.035 --> 18:15.215
the gestural modality.

18:15.635 --> 18:17.335
Gester shows more flexibility.

18:17.875 --> 18:21.495
Um, it great, you know, in great apes in human children.

18:21.955 --> 18:25.695
Um, it's, it's really, it's the most important modality.

18:26.515 --> 18:28.735
And, and there are a bunch of,

18:28.795 --> 18:31.655
of theories pulling evidence from different areas, some

18:31.655 --> 18:35.655
of which I've discussed today, that suggest that early

18:36.315 --> 18:38.695
in human evolutionary history, you know,

18:38.695 --> 18:42.695
over the last million years, let's say 500,000 years, that,

18:42.995 --> 18:46.895
you know, that gesture may have, you know,

18:46.895 --> 18:48.015
really been there first.

18:48.475 --> 18:51.015
And that speech is, was a later development.

18:51.155 --> 18:55.095
And so I, I'm not saying that language evolved fully

18:55.155 --> 18:56.255
as sign language, right?

18:56.255 --> 18:58.935
So the sign languages that we see in humans today are,

18:59.115 --> 19:02.975
are full, structured languages, just

19:02.975 --> 19:04.375
as any spoken language is.

19:05.075 --> 19:06.455
Not saying that, you know,

19:06.755 --> 19:09.775
our evolutionary ancestors had sign language,

19:09.995 --> 19:12.895
but they may have had more complicated gestural systems

19:13.445 --> 19:18.375
that in fact, laid the foundation for the kinds of,

19:19.195 --> 19:21.975
of highly structured grammatical systems

19:22.245 --> 19:25.175
that you see in both spoken and in sign languages today.

Exploring Gesture Studies and Communication

00:00:00 - So it's not a book. I haven't written a book yet. so I think that that maybe the, I mean, I've written several pieces on gesture. I mean, it's something I've studied in my, you know, in my lab for a while, something I worked on in my postdoc as well as my PhD. but I haven't written a book like manuscript yet. So I don't know if you wanna like, change the introduction a little bit. You could just say, my work jester is broadly.
00:00:32 - of gesture studies has actually grown quite a bit over the last maybe 20 years. And it really depends. The precise definition of gesture really depends on who you're talking to. there's sort of different schools of thought when it comes to thinking about gesture. I like to have to take a definition of gesture that is movements of the hand and arms and head, that occurred during the course of conversation.
00:01:05 - a pretty encompassing definition of what we refer to as Coe gesture. So these are our gestures that occur within the context of speech or surrounding speech, which works really well if you're studying the, the hand movements and bodily communication of adults and of humans. but I also work with children and I work with great apes, and I think there that definition doesn't work as well with great apes.
00:01:34 - And with very young children, gestures might take the place of speech rather than accompany speech. So it's, I think when you're working on with gesture, when you're studying gesture, but you're studying it in creatures outside of adult humans, then you need to, to take a slightly different definition. So, for example, with children, it might not be that gestures are cos speech, right? Which imply that that gestures
00:02:05 - Instead, it might be that children are communicating to, to say an adult or to another child. And it might be that they're using vocalizations as well as gestures, but they're not using speech per se. It depends on the age of the child. Well, with great apes, which a lot of my work has really focused on the great apes, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, and humans we're also a great ape, but the non-human great apes.
00:02:38 - to again, sort of go back to the drawing board and think, okay, what does it mean to use gesture when you don't have a spoken language? So apes are, use a lot of gesture to communicate with one another. but they're doing it not within the context of a conversation or with a spoken conversation. They're doing It, where gesture is often the primary medium of communication. And so there we use a set of, of criteria

Defining Intentionality in Gesture Communication

00:03:12 - So where they intending to communicate. And there we're actually u sort of borrowing and modifying, criteria from early child communication, right? You have the same problem if you're studying a 1-year-old or you're studying an orangutan, and we don't know, sort of what movements they're making with their body are communicative and which ones are not, right? So it's, you have to really use evidence from the interaction to argue
00:03:43 - not accidental, right? They don't just go shoo, or, you know, they're not just shooing away a bug. They're actually waving to get attention. And so the way that you do that is to look for evidence that they are intending to communicate. And so this is sort of brings in all of this philosophy, all of these, you know, it's a, it's a big question, right? How do you measure intention? And, you know, that's probably longer than we have today. But just in brief, what, what we use as,
00:04:17 - a gesture is directed towards another individual. So if I'm waving my hand, I'm gonna be focused towards you when I do it. That, there's expectation of a response and evidence for that can be several different directions. So it could be that I wait for a response, so I face you, I wave my hand and that I wait. Or it could be I face you, I wave my hand.
00:04:46 - I keep communicating and I change the way I communicate. So I might slow down, you know, I go from hey to, or I might change to a different, to a different signal. So I might start with, you know, waving my hand and then clap to get your attention, wave bigger, wave both hands, something like that. So you're seeing this, this persistence and this elaboration or escalation of the signal and waiting for a response.
00:05:17 - to a particular individual. I am doing it with an expectation of getting a particular kind of response. And so that's what we use as evidence and intentionality. So, so representational gestures really refer more to the, the kinds of gestures where, they, they have meaning through the movements that they're, that you're making with your hands, rather than,
00:05:50 - So for example, you know, if I hold up a cup and I point to the cup, we describe that as a dy dick gesture. It can also have a diic gesture of just holding something up, right? It's directing attention to something. And we typically don't describe those as representational gestures because the meaning is anchored in the object itself rather than in the gesture. The gesture is just directing attention towards that. representational gestures would encompass things like

Understanding Representational Gestures in Communication

00:06:24 - the, the reference. So for example, with cup, I could use my hands to show the shape of the cup, or I could hold an imaginary cup, right? So it could be I'm holding like more of a glass of water, or I'm holding a mug and I could, you know, pretend to drink out of it, or I could trace, you know, the circle and the, the handle of the mug that would be representing the object through,
00:06:51 - And sometimes in function, if I'm illustrating the function, now, ity can be quite complicated. So it seems really simple. You look at it and you're like, the movements that you're making map onto the thing that, that you mean. But there's actually, evidence that, that ity can is, is more complicated for children and for apes. So for adults, we see something just like playing charades. It's like, you're acting something out. I get that, that your movement is,
00:07:22 - It's a representational gesture. but for, for young chil very young children, and for apes, it can be more complicated because you have to, you have to understand what features of the movement are important, and you have to understand the analogy between those features of the movement and the features of the real world. For example, if I was going to to, to, you know, gesture about a tree, I could have, you know, the trunk, I could gesture the branches,
00:07:55 - I could gesture about all the leaves. I could do a, you know, a palm tree versus a big oak. there, you know, I could talk about climbing the tree. And within, within a conversational context, it's, it can really make a lot of sense, right? It can be very helpful. representational gestures can, can kind of provide a lot of quality and depth to, you know, if I just say tree, you don't know what kind of tree I'm talking about, but if I gesture about the tree, you learn something about it.
00:08:28 - the relationship I have to it, you know, is it over there? Is it over here? Is it big? Is it small? Am I in the tree itself? Is the, am i under the tree? and so, so representational gestures can provide all of that richness, but if you just have one in isolation, it can be pretty, it's a pretty difficult task actually, to, to figure out what parts of the gesture are, are mapping on to the thing in the real world.
00:08:57 - that I gave was really about iconic gesture. It's where the, the movement of the hands maps onto the features of something in the, in the real world. There's another set of, of gestures which are, are referred to either as conventional gestures or sometimes as emblems, where they're really symbolic. And so there, the, the form of the gesture doesn't resemble the thing that it stands for. It it only means that thing because we as a community agree that it does.

Understanding Gestures and Their Cultural Variations

00:09:30 - or the community can be, you know, a city or a family or even just one person, right? So you can have a secret handshake, say with a friend or a secret, you know, hand symbol that you agree means something and outside, you know, people who looking from the outside wouldn't understand that. And so we do see that those kinds of gestures can vary. You know, they vary cross-culturally, they're actually more similar across cultures than, than you would expect given that, that they have to sort of,
00:10:00 - because people agree that they mean something, you know, but think about, you know, the thumbs up gesture. Okay? things like that. one of my, my favorite gestures is, so I lived in Poland for a few years, and one of my favorite gestures there is this, you know, like tap, tap of the neck. And I, like in the US I it, when I ask, say, students in the classroom, what do you think this means? And they'll say like, cut it out, or something like that. In Poland, at least in the part of Poland
00:10:31 - Like you're filled up to here. Like, they were really drunk. And you also think about the kinds of rude gestures. I'm not gonna do them here, but those I think are really nice examples of these symbolic conventional gestures that vary from place to place. So, to come, to come back to your question about, about how jester works with speech. So there are, there are different ways
00:11:04 - you know, I think that maybe the, the most comprehensive one is to simply say that that gesture and speech together form a unified system. So there's really good evidence that there's a tight, deep rooted relationship between gesture and speech. It's not just that we speak and we gesture and we, we happen to do both at the same time, right? They really, they, they are, sometimes I say intimately entwined, right?
00:11:34 - if you prevent people from gesturing, say if you have them sit on their hands or, or, you put their hands in gloves and you velcro them to a table, you'll see that their speech will show more disfluencies. So they'll say, and, they'll have a harder time recalling words And, and they won't speak as fluently and they won't speak as long. And, you see the same thing happen when you restrict, speech. So in the case of stuttering,
00:12:05 - researchers working on stuttering that during stuttering gesture is also interrupted. So if they were separate systems, then you would expect that if one system fails, the other system would take over. There's actually evidence that when one system is impaired, it, the other system is also impaired. And so, you know, there, there's evidence from that. There's evidence from neuroimaging, and, and EEG, that, that there is actually, sort of simultaneous processing of both speech and of jester.

Understanding Gesture's Role in Communication

00:12:38 - about jester is that it's part of language, but it's different than speech. So speech has really specific rules, you know, different rules depending on the language that you speak, but every, every language has rules, has grammatical rules, that, you know, that really tightly constrain, speech and in a way that, that some things are grammatical, some things are not grammatical, you know, and, and it's, it's much easier to sort of predict,
00:13:12 - what is allowable in gesture, because gesture is much more wide open. And so gesture almost has sort of an analog. If you think about speech as being more digital, one thing at a time in a row, following rules, gesture allows us to communicate in a more analog holistic manner. it it providing different information from what's happening in speech. And so gesture can reinforce what's happening in speech. It can disambiguate what's happening in speech, you know,
00:13:45 - If I just say, I want that one, who the heck knows what that is? Right? Almost always when we use something like this or that here or there in speech, we're gesturing. And so you can disambiguate what's what you're saying in speech. You can also add to what you're saying in speech. So sometimes what gesture, the information gesture is providing is complimentary, but different from the information in speech. And so thinking about those relationships,
00:14:15 - provided in speech, what information is being provided in gesture and, and, how the, the sum of both of those modalities gives a fuller pitch picture of communication. you know, I think is a very interesting question. I think I'm maybe gonna talk more about the evolution of language. 'cause that's what I work on. I don't really work on gesture and learning, although there's beautiful research on that. so I think there's some really nice evidence
00:14:48 - can use their gestures in ways that help them understand a problem better. So, it was off, there's a great body of literature on gesture for thinking as well as gesture for communication. And so a lot of the things that we do with our hands while we're talking are not just for communicating to other people, they're also for us. And so by putting, you're almost putting ideas out there and then returning to them, you, you know,
00:15:17 - as if you were sketching something on paper. You can draw things with your hands, you can think you can rotate them, you can think about them in different ways. It provides an opportunity to externalize some of our internal thought processes. And, and there's, you know, there's evidence from, from experimental work that shows that that actually helps with learning certain kinds of problems with working through more difficult problems, even if you understand, you know, sort of a basic level of a problem.

Gesture's Role in Learning and Language Evolution

00:15:52 - can be a resource to support what we call working memory is the kind of memory that you need when you're say, remembering how to answer a question someone just asks. So, so, we know that that gestures that learners themselves make can help them learn. We also know that learners are sensitive to the gestures that instructors make. And so there are people working on, on trying to,
00:16:22 - that involve gesture as one, as one possible visual aid. And then coming to the question of gesture in the evolution of language, this is, possibly my favorite question. So I work on the evolution of language and on je, so I love the intersection of these. there's, there are theories that jester actually played a much bigger role early in, earlier in human evolution. So when we look at the, at the existing great apes,
00:16:56 - and gorillas, all of them jester only humans have spoken language, but, the other apes have vocalizations, but their gestures seem to, to be more similar to human gesture than their vocalizations are similar to human speech. And so one possibility is that the, the gestural communication of our last common ancestor we're talking 12, 13 million years ago, that for that species
00:17:29 - And that, as you know, as the great apes evolved to, you know, to the present era, je stayed really important. And that when, when humans and chimpanzees and bonobos, and the lineages that led to chimpanzees and bonobos on the one hand, and to humans on the other hand, when those lineages diverged, about, you know, a, a few million years ago, that jester
00:18:00 - for our last common ancestor. So if jester was fact the most important modality, then it could be the case that language actually evolved first within the gestural modality. Gester shows more flexibility. it great, you know, in great apes in human children. it's, it's really, it's the most important modality. And, and there are a bunch of,
00:18:31 - of which I've discussed today, that suggest that early in human evolutionary history, you know, over the last million years, let's say 500,000 years, that, you know, that gesture may have, you know, really been there first. And that speech is, was a later development. And so I, I'm not saying that language evolved fully as sign language, right? So the sign languages that we see in humans today are,

Gestural Systems and Language Evolution

00:19:22 - as any spoken language is. Not saying that, you know, our evolutionary ancestors had sign language, but they may have had more complicated gestural systems that in fact, laid the foundation for the kinds of, of highly structured grammatical systems that you see in both spoken and in sign languages today.

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