Lecture 7 - Gestural communication

Question 1

What is a gesture?

Answer 1

• a movement of a body part often a limb to express a thought, meaning or emotion
• speech and gestures are an integrated system

Question 2

What are the 5 gesture types?

Answer 2

1. iconic gestures = represent attributes of objets e.g. gesturing a telephone
2. emblems = conventional gestures that have meaning to a particular community e.g. thumbs up
3. metaphoric = represent an abstract idea/ concept
4. pointing = refer someone’s attention to something
5. beats = maintain the rhythm of speech but don’t contain semantic information

Question 3

Gesture and thought?

Answer 3

• gestures can help a speaker communicate complex information and process it
• people tend to gesture to themselves when a task is harder
• when describing complex spatial information people produce more co-speech gestures

Question 4

What is the information packaging hypothesis Kita 200?

Answer 4

gestures help a speaker organise and break down complex visuo-spatial information into smaller packages that can then be verbalised as speech

Question 5

What is embodied cognition?

Answer 5

• the notion that the body influences how we think and communicate
• certain thoughts have their origins in the body - particularly our gestures

Question 6

Gesture and language comprehension?

Answer 6

• gestures assist speech comprehension
• children benefit more from speech-accompanying gestures than adults
• gestures communicate information not provided in speech

Question 7

Gesture development?

Answer 7

• children gesture before they speak
• children begin using symbolic gestures around 10-12 months
• gesture development predicts spoken language development

Question 8

What did Tommasello 2010 say was the most fundamental human gesture?

Answer 8

pointing

Question 9

What are home signs?

Answer 9

• deaf children raised in speaking families without exposure to sign language develop ‘home signs’
• home signs show linguistic properties resembling early sign languages e.g.
  -> they have their own lexicons (morphemes & words)
  -> sentences have consistent ordering of elements (syntax)
• children contribute properties of language to their home signs, its not coming from the parents gestures

Question 10

Nicaraguan sign language (NSL)?

Answer 10

• a community of deaf children in Nicaragua taught in spoken Spanish despite being deaf
• these children produced home-signs and started using these at school together = invented their own sign language
• new cohorts learnt and reshaped the language further

Question 11

Sign language?

Answer 11

• at least 300 of them, they are full languages
• structure doesn’t depend on the surrounding spoken language
• possess linguistic properties such as:
  -> syntactic structure (sign sentences)
  -> morphological structure (the signs themselves)
  -> phonological structure (meaningless sub-sign elements like phonemes)