Gesturing is about thinking and communication, and is a sophisticated aid to both
Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago has a rather different view. Emotions come out in lots of ways: facial expressions, posture, tone of voice and so on. But people are doing something different when they use gestures with speech, which she sums up in the title of her new book, “Thinking With Your Hands”. It is a masterly tour through a lifetime’s research.
Virtually everyone gestures, not just Italians. Experimental subjects, told after a research session that they were being watched for gestures, apologise for not having made any—but were doing so the entire time. Conference interpreters gesture in their little booths, though no one is looking. People born blind gesture when they speak, including to each other. A woman born without arms but with “” describes how she uses her phantom arms when she talks—but not when she walks.
The gesture under discussion here is mostly the “co-speech” kind. It is much more abstract than mime . Nor are these “emblematic” gestures like a thumbs-up or a finger over the lips for “Silence!” Like words, those are fixed within cultures . Instead, gestures that accompany speech are a second channel of information. Subjects watch a film in which a cat runs but are told to lie and say it jumped. They do so in words—while their hands make a running motion.
Returning to conventional gesture, the author keeps her focus on child development. Some students who fail at a tricky mathematics problem may gesture in a way that indicates they are on the verge of getting it; they should be taught differently from the ones whose gestures suggest that they are entirely at sea. Children who still use only one word at a time may combine a word and a gesture; this successfully predicts that two-word phrases are just around the corner.
All this is rounded out in a final section offering practical advice. Teachers are encouraged both to use gestures themselves and to observe those their students make. Parents are taught to fill in the word a child is most likely to be missing when they gesture rather than adding information . Children with language delays caused by brain injuries at or around birth, but who nonetheless gesture as much as their peers, are likely to catch up verbally by the age of about 30 months.
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