The nature of gestures’ beneficial role in spatial problem solving

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Co-thought and Co-speech Gestures Are Generated by the Same Action Generation Process

We thank Lucy Foulkes, Rachel Furness, Valentina Lee, and Zeshu Shao for their help with data collection; Paraskevi Argyriou for her help with reliability checks of gesture coding; and Agnieszka Konopka and Josje Praamstra for their help with proofreading this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

Pointing as an Instrumental Gesture : Gaze Representation Through Indication

The research of the first author was supported by a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship and developed in 2012 during a period of research visit at the University of Memphis.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

How Do Gestures Influence Thinking and Speaking? The Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis.

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The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture

Seeing iconic gesture promotes first- and second-order verb generalization in preschoolers

This study investigated whether seeing iconic gestures depicting verb referents promotes two types of generalization. We taught 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds novel locomotion verbs. Children who saw iconic manner gestures during training generalized more verbs to novel events (first‐order generalization ) than children who saw interactive gestures (Experiment 1, N = 48; Experiment 2, N = 48) and path‐tracing gestures (Experiment 3, N = 48). Furthermore, immediately (Experiments 1 and 3) and after 1 week (Experiment 2), the iconic manner gesture group outperformed the control groups in subsequent generalization trials with different novel verbs (second‐order generalization ), although all groups saw interactive gestures. Thus, seeing iconic gestures that depict verb referents helps children (a) generalize individual verb meanings to novel events and (b) learn more verbs from the same subcategory

The listener automatically uses spatial story representations from the speaker's cohesive gestures when processing subsequent sentences without gestures

This study examined spatial story representations created by speaker's cohesive gestures. Participants were presented with three-sentence discourse with two protagonists. In the first and second sentences, gestures consistently located the two protagonists in the gesture space: one to the right and the other to the left. The third sentence (without gestures) referred to one of the protagonists, and the participants responded with one of the two keys to indicate the relevant protagonist. The response keys were either spatially congruent or incongruent with the gesturally established locations for the two participants. Though the cohesive gestures did not provide any clue for the correct response, they influenced performance: the reaction time in the congruent condition was faster than that in the incongruent condition. Thus, cohesive gestures automatically establish spatial story representations and the spatial story representations remain activated in a subsequent sentence without any gesture

Gestural depiction of motion events in narrative increases symbolic distance with age

We examined gesture representation of motion events in narratives produced by three- and nine-year-olds, and adults. Two aspects of gestural depiction were analysed: how protagonists were depicted, and how gesture space was used. We found that older age groups were more likely to express protagonists as an object that a gesturing hand held and manipulated, and less likely to express protagonists with whole-body enactment gestures. Furthermore, for older age groups, gesture space increasingly became less similar to narrated space. The older age groups were less likely to use large gestures or gestures in the periphery of the gesture space to represent movements that were large relative to a protagonist’s body or that took place next to a protagonist. They were also less likely to produce gestures on a physical surface (e.g., table) to represent movement on a surface in narrated events. The development of gestural depiction indicates that older speakers become less immersed in the story world and start to control and manipulate story representation from an outside perspective in a bounded and stage-like gesture space. We discussed this developmental shift in terms of increasing ‘symbolic distancing’ (Werner & Kaplan, 1963)

Children creating core properties of language : evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua

A new sign language has been created by deaf Nicaraguans over the past 35 years, providing an opportunity to observe the inception of universal hallmarks of language. The present study shows that children initially creating the language began analyzing complex events into basic elements, and sequencing these elements into hierarchically structured expressions, following principles not observed in gestures accompanying speech in the surrounding language. Successive cohorts of learners extended this procedure, transforming Nicaraguan signing from its early gestural form into a linguistic system. We propose that this early segmentation and recombination reflect mechanisms with which children learn, and thereby perpetuate, language. Thus, children naturally possess learning abilities capable of giving language its fundamental structure