Gesture and Language: A Cognitive Perspective
Turning to science throws a more discriminating light on the subject of gesture. Susan Goldin-Meadow (1999), one of a number of developmental cognitive psychologists researching the role of gesture in communication and its relation to language, divides gestures into two types: the gestures that substitute for speech and clearly serve a communicative function and the gestures that I have referred to in the earlier part of this paper, those performed unknowingly. The former gestures Goldin-Meadow (1999, 419–420) reveals as taking language-like forms; they are codified and structured. A particular sign such as joining the thumb and forefinger to create the sign of ‘OK’ or such as lifting a thumb to another to sign ‘Thumbs Up’ cannot be substituted by altering the fingering. Change the fingers and the communication is not the same. More complex systems of language type gestures such as various sign languages fit into this category.Goldin-Meadow (1999, 419) has called the spontaneous gestures that accompany language ‘imagistic and analog’. These gestures, despite being spontaneously and unconsciously made, have been shown to have meaning for both the listener (Kendon 1994) and for the speaker (Goldin-Meadow 1999). All speakers gesture, even blind speakers and even when they are speaking to others who they know to be blind (Goldin-Meadow 1999, 427). Psycholinguists (Özyürek and Kelly 2007, 181) have shown that these gestures are linked to language through timing and meaning to the ‘ongoing speech stream’. Gestures operate in relation to language according to Spencer D Kelly (Kelly et al 1999, 588), another developmental cognitive psychologist, to ‘disambiguate the meaning of speech’ and that likewise ‘speech disambiguates the meaning of gesture’. Kelly (p. 588) writes that ’eyes, hands, or tone of voice… actively codetermine the meaning’ of anything that is spoken.
In the You Tube clip, ‘Talking Twins Pt 2.’ (Talking Twins Part 2, 2011) two twins in nappies, who may be under a year old, stand in front of a fridge animatedly ‘speaking’ to one another in gobbledygook. The twins gesture dynamically to each other; they raise their arms, they wave their hands at each other and one of them raises a leg, all the while clearly having an animated ‘dialogue’ with each other. They demand and answer each other, despite the fact that as yet they have not developed verbal skills. They are in intentional action where their bodies are the principal means of communicating. The twins’ gestures, their tone of voice and their laughter are the techniques or embodied habits through which they are interacting. Their interaction is specific and through it they establish a jointly understood contention. The primacy of the embodied nature of speech is highlighted through this video clip. As Cornelia Müller (2007, 110), a dedicated gestural theorist has indicated language needs to be considered as ‘multimodal… an integration of speech and gesture’ and ‘its natural home [is] – face-to-face situations’.
David McNeill (2005), the renown American psycholinguist takes the claims of the relationship between gesture and language further claiming that gestures are actually necessary to thinking and speaking; ‘Gestures fuel thought and speech’ (p. 3). There is a dynamic interaction which is performative in its spatial enactment between speech and gesture.
As children acquire their language they are also constructing a speech-gesture system. Gesture and speech grow up together. We should speak not of language acquisition, but of language-gesture acquisition. (McNeill 1992, 295)
Gesturing enables the speaker to clarify his or her thinking. Susan Goldin-Meadow (1999, 427) asserts that this occurs by ‘shifting the [cognitive] burden from verbal to spatial memory’. In other words there is a downloading of articulation abilities by placing part of that articulation into spatially and physically expressed gestures. Gestures also assist in the access to new thoughts, enabling ‘for the first time notions that are not fully developed’ (Goldin-Meadow 1999, 427). Gesturing has also been shown to have a causal relationship in learning (Cook et al 2008), so that by gesturing we can retain an embodied way of meeting and representing new thoughts.