People move their hands when they talk, and these gestures take many forms. They may move their hands in time with the pace of their speech: Politicians often do this when speaking in front of a group. They may point when drawing attention to a particular spot or asking for something they want.
Many gestures also track the content of what is being said. A speaker might say, “John ran from his chair to the pool and dove in” and make a gesture that tracks the motion, including a little rise and fall in the gesture to indicate John’s dive.
How do people learn to make these gestures?
An obvious answer to this question is that they see other speakers making these gestures, and so they may learn to make gestures during speech by watching other speakers. An alternative possibility, though, is that there is something about particular languages that influences the gestures people make.
This question was explored in an interesting way in a paper by Seyda Ozcaliskan, Che Lucero, and Susan Goldin-Meadow in a paper in the May 2016 issue of Psychological Science.
They compared the speech and gestures made by congenitally blind individuals and sighted speakers. To provide a clear test, they compared native speakers of English to native speakers of Turkish.
A key element of this study was that they asked people to describe scenes involving motion toward or away from a landmark. They used these sentences, because English and Turkish differ in the way they tend to describe these situations. An English speaker might say, “John ran toward the house.” This sentence packages together the manner of motion (running) and the direction (toward) in the same part of the sentence.
Turkish speakers tend to separate the manner of motion and the direction when speaking. They might say something that translates to “John moved toward the house running,” or they might even use separate sentences for the manner of movement and the direction.
Sighted speakers of these languages also differ in the kinds of gestures they make when using these sentences. Speakers of English often use gestures that combine the manner of motion with the direction. They might move their fingers to simulate running while moving their hands from one place to another. Speakers of Turkish generally make gestures only for the direction of motion, though at times they will make separate gestures, one that indicates the direction and a second that corresponds to the manner of motion.
In this study, participants were given scenes involving motions of an individual toward or away from a landmark. They were asked to describe the scenes. The scenes were constructed from foam boards so that blind participants could feel what they were describing. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded for this task. Others were not. Participants were told to use their hands while they spoke to encourage gestures. This is important, because blind speakers gesture much less often spontaneously than sighted speakers.
The researchers analyzed both the sentences people produced to describe the scenes as well as the gestures they made.
Unsurprisingly, the speech produced by blind and sighted speakers of a given language was similar. Blind and sighted speakers of English used sentences that combined the manner and direction of motion. Speakers of Turkish used sentences that separated the manner from the direction.
Interestingly, the gestures of blind speakers of a particular language were also similar to the gestures of sighted speakers. English speakers tended to use gestures that combined manner and direction. Turkish speakers tended to use gestures that separated direction from manner and they were most likely to make gestures that focused on the direction of the motion.
These results suggest that native speakers of a language use the natural way of talking about events to structure the gestures they make that relate to those events. Even though, blind speakers have never seen the gestures made by native speakers, they still make gestures that are like those of sighted speakers of their language.
As it turns out, though, there is still an ongoing debate in the language literature about the function of these gestures. It is natural to assume that people make these gestures to help listeners to understand the sentence being spoken. However, some researchers have argued that the gestures actually help speakers to produce sentences. More work needs to be done to understand how gestures help listeners to understand language.
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