Do you talk with your hands? Speaking and gesturing go together so unconsciously we often don’t bother to pay attention to what we are doing with our hands while we speak. We think of gesture as communicating, but if that is true, why do we gesture when we are on the telephone? Even blind people who have never seen another person gesture will gesture. There is something more going on here, even if we are not often aware of it.
So, what drives our need to gesture?
And how does the language we speak relate to the way we gesture?
The most obvious function of gestures is for communicating. For example, you might use your hands to point out which cake you want to buy, or demonstrate how big the polka dots are on your new umbrella. But we also use gestures even when no one is watching, such as when we're on the phone, so communication can't be the only thing they're good for.
Gesturing Helps with Memory
Sure enough, research has demonstrated that gestures help us think. Sotaro Kita, Martha Alibali and Mingyuan Chu have a recent paper that draws together two decades of research on gesturing. For example, one study found that when you prevent people from gesturing, they find it harder to think of the words they want to say.
Gesturing doesn’t just help with speaking either, it can help with thinking. Several studies asked people to silently solve puzzles that involved rotating complex shapes—the people who were encouraged to gesture about it got the right answer more often than the people who gestured only the normal amount. Similarly, in a task where people had to remember directions from a map, the group who practiced the route by gesturing their way through it remembered it better than people who only looked at the map or drew a copy.
People Who Are Gesturing Subconsciously Consider Their Audience
This doesn't mean that we are completely unaware of whether we have an audience when we are gesturing. Although people do gesture on the phone, we use our hands more when speaking to somebody face-to-face. Compared to both of these situations, we're even less likely to gesture when speaking into a tape recorder—when we're not expecting an audience who will listen to the tape afterward.
People also tailor their gestures to their audience. In an experiment by Autumn Hostetter, Martha Alibali and Sheree Schrager, participants had to explain the rules of a game to another person who they would then play the game with. In one case, the instructions were for someone who the explainer would be playing with collaboratively, in another version the instructions were to be given to someone the explainer would play against competitively. The instructions were exactly the same, and in both cases the speaker made a similar number of gestures, but when the instructions were given to a competitor, the size of the gestures was smaller. It doesn’t pay to help the opposition.
Gestures are part of our linguistic communication because they are closely tied to language in the human brain. Imagine you’re in a café and you say to the waiter:
“Can I please have a piece of that cake.”
As you say “that,” you are pointing with your index finger at the lemon drizzle cake. In order for your finger to be extended and pointing by time you get to that, you need to start moving your hand a couple of words earlier. This means the brain has to coordinate the movement of your hands to align with an upcoming word.
In the same way, the next time you’re watching a politician give a speech, notice that the rhythm of the gestures will line up with the stress of the words. Politicians may hold their hands in a certain way, and it’s likely some public-speaking expert has told them they look more ‘commanding’ or ‘open’ for it, but they’ll all synchronize their gestures and their speech.
Gestures Are Tied to a Language’s Structure
As far as we know, all human languages are accompanied by gesturing. Even users of sign languages will incorporate gestures alongside the grammatical elements of their language. But speakers of different languages also gesture differently—and some of these differences are linked to the structure of the language itself.
Take Turkish and English, for example. When it comes to talking about the way objects move, these two languages use different verb structures. In English you might say
“The ball is rolling down the hill.”
In this sentence, rolling is a verb and down is a preposition giving additional information about the direction. But Turkish speakers would use a structure that would translate literally into English as something more like
“The ball rolling, descending the hill.”
(yuvarlanarak iniyor)
Unlike in English, these are two separate verbs instead of one verb with a modifier. One verb gives you the type of motion, the other gives you the path.
Asli Özyürek and Sotaro Kita demonstrated that when English puts these two pieces of information into the one verb phrase, English speakers are also likely to conflate them into a single gesture. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. rolling or bouncing) and trajectory (e.g. downward or left to right) together in one gesture, with spiraling downward hand motions.
But just as Turkish speakers use separate verbs for manner and trajectory, they will also show these features with two separate gestures, first demonstrating the action of rolling without the downward movement, and then showing the downward path in a straight movement without the rolling.
Even Blind People Use Gestures
These differences in gesturing patterns appear to be related to the structure of the language, and not learned. We know this because a recent study by Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow built on Özyürek and Kita’s work, but focused on the gestures of blind Turkish and English speakers. These participants were given the same job as their sighted counterparts: describing situations that included motion. The results for both Turkish and English speakers who had been blind from birth was consistent with the earlier study. That is to say, even though the blind English speakers in the study had never seen someone gesture in a way that included both manner and trajectory, they did so in their descriptions of the events. Similarly, the blind Turkish participants separated the motion and trajectory in both their speech and gestures.
All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that is deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
We gesture because it can be helpful, and to make sure the other person knows just which cake we want. Gesture is not only useful in communicating with others, but it helps us to think as well. It also means that our hands can tell us things about the structure of language, in the grammar and in our brain, that we didn’t notice before.
That segment was written by Lauren Gawne, who blogs at superlinguo.com and is the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. Thanks for blowing my mind.
And a little follow up from me: As I was editing this piece I agonized for far too long over the phrase exactly the same when we were describing giving instructions for a game: The instructions were exactly the same. I know some of you would notice and possibly comment that it's one of those phrases that regularly shows up in lists of unnecessarily redundant phrases. But here's the thing: Changing exactly the same to identical sounded wrong to me. The sentence lost its oomph and it also felt like it lost emphasis on the sameness, so I decided to keep it. Editing is about making something good, not about slavishly following rules. As I've said before, redundancy isn't always wrong and can sometimes help add emphasis, like when we add myself to a sentence like I baked the cake myself. So that's all to say, please don't write to me about exactly the same. I did it on purpose.
Sources
Hostetter, Autumn B., Martha W. Alibali & Sheree M. Schrager. 2011. If you don't already know, I'm certainly not going to show you!: Motivation to communicate affects gesture production. In Gale Stam and Mika Ishino (eds.) Integrating Gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture, 61–74. John Benjamins.
Kita, Sotaro, Alibali, Martha W., & Chu, Mingyuan. (2017). How Do Gestures Influence Thinking and Speaking? The Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis. Psychological Review. Advance online publication.
Özçalışkan, Şeyda, Ché Lucero & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5), 737–747.
Özyürek, Asli & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 507-512. Erlbaum.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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