by Jenna Kronenberg (jekronenberg@vassar.edu)
Talking about the evolution of spoken language has made me question the reasons behind our others means of communication, namely hand gestures. For those who are able to speak, we tend to use our hands to supplement our speech. I want to talk a little about something I learned last semester; a chapter in the book The First Word by Christine Kenneally caught my attention and it is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about through our class.
If you have ever watched me speak in class, you may notice that I talk with my hands a LOT. I used to think it was just me, and a family/cultural thing (Eastern European Jews have the stereotype of talking with their hands way too often). But watching people talk all over campus, I’ve realized that everyone uses their hands when they talk.
Kenneally writes, “If you have human language, you have gestures (Kenneally 123).” What does this mean exactly? Imagine yourself talking about your room. You may mention what’s on your walls, where your bed and desk are situated. You may describe how messy it is.
It’s quite likely that you used your hands as you spoke. Gesturing is spontaneous, and individual to each that has used it. But think about it. Where you mentally calculating your hand movements as you spoke? (Now that I’ve mentioned it, it’s going to be really difficult to not be cognizant of it. Sorry.)
Gesturing may be important for human communication, but what is fascinating is that different species of apes have been observed using their hands to communicate as well. In 2004, Mike Tomasello observed that primates have gestures that are learned, flexible, and under voluntary control. His research team divided primate gestures into two categories: attention getters and intention movements.
Attention getters (It is important to note that as Tomasello presented this information he slapped the podium with his hand) call attention to the ape making the gesture. An ape may jump up and down and flap his arms until a second ape pays attention, and then realizes that the first ape wants to be groomed. Intention movements are the beginnings of actual movements, like if one raises an arm before they attack.
How have these gestures evolved in humans? Well, think about how we gesture daily. We may wave at a friend across the quad to get their attention, signaling we want to speak to them. We may raise our first to signal potential violence.
An example of intentional hand gestures (Kind of long, skip around as you please):
Human gestures come in a variety of ways that Kenneally highlights in her book. There is here-and-now pointing, action gestures, abstract pointing, and metaphorical gestures that make symbolic references to people, events, space, motion, and action. I would like to focus a bit on this last category since it deals with abstract symbols that we use our bodies to indicate.
Gestures tend to amplify meaning given by the speaker. For example, someone may move his or her fingers in a spiral while saying “I ran upstairs.” This gesture helps us find more meaning in what the speaker is saying (he or she ran up a spiral staircase).
It would appear that gestures are also some sort of device we use to retrieve lexical memory. How many times have you been speaking and draw a blank on a word (having that feeling of it being on “the tip of your tongue”)? Do you use your hands to try to get out the word? I mean, really. Does that make any sense? The word is not in thin air; you cannot grab it with your hands. But it seems to work. In a paper by Robert Krauss at Columbia University, he and his team suggest that memory is encoded in different representational formats. They believe that our hand gestures reflect “spacio-dynamic features of concepts, and that they participate in lexical retrieval by a process of cross-modal priming” (Krauss 2).
Some (sort of) involuntary hand movements while talking:
What does this mean to you? Do you find that when participating in a rehearsed speech, you use your hands quite often to keep you on track? Does moving your hands in a certain way conjure up different words, depending on how you’ve stored them in your memory (from past experiences, note-taking, etc)?
The study of human gestures is still quite new, and there are many questions about how it has evolved; whether alongside spoken language, or before/after. What I’m curious about is: how does it affect our everyday communication? Not only is gesturing used by the speaker, it affects how the listener processes that language too. Hand gestures are an integral part of our language, and can be used to represent many different concepts and emotions the speaker is trying to convey.
Sources:
Kenneally, Christine. The First Word. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007
Krauss, R.M. (1998). Whydo we gesture when we speak?59.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 7, 54-59
I’m pretty aware of when I’m gesturing (in part because I’m pretty clumsy) and also of what I’m gesturing with my hands. I not only gesture more emphatically and deliberately when I’m interested in a subject and want to get a point across, but I also have a different but specific range of gestures that I use when I’m expressing a specific state of mind. Certain gestures only crop up when I’m being sarcastic, and my use of “jazz hands” when I’m surprised and happy. As a person who likes using gestures in lieu of speech, the meanings that gestures can convey are pretty readily apparent.
There was a book I read for a cog-sci class last semester by Mark Johnson called The Meaning of the Body, and in it, Johnson elaborated on a point that a couple of people further up in the thread have also pointed out: that gestures not only help to emphasize the mood and meaning of words, but that they actually provide a locus for moods and meanings themselves. Johnson wasn’t explicitly talking about gestures in his book, but he was talking about rooting the meaning of words–and where they came from–in humans’ experience of their environment. His point was that we’re not always sure how our language ended up with the components that it did, but that if we equate it to our experience of the world and how we express that non-verbally, it becomes readily apparent that semantics and grammar are intimately connected to an embodied human’s narrative experience of the world. Gestures mimic the motions that we can undertake, and they show how semantics can be so intimately connected to the experience of embeddedness in meaning.
Also, I found an article discussing the discovery verifying that iconic gestures activate the motor cortex in the brain: “hand movements captured both shapes that were directly perceived, and shapes that were only implicitly activated by unrelated semantic judgments of object words.” Here’s the link: http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00214/abstract
The more emphatic I am when speaking, or if I percieve that my message isn’t quite getting across, I’ve found that’s when I end up using more gestures when talking. Stronger ones too. I agree that you couldn’t really tell the difference between the pre-meditated gestures and the spontaneous ones, which was interesting to think about. Children use gestures before they can speak; it’s a very ancient trait that we’ve inherited from our pre-hominin ancestors. Some quick research told me that spatial or deitic gestures, like pointing develop first in children, before the iconic ones develop. This makes sense as our symbolic capacity evolved later on than the deitic gesturing found in other primates still living.
How do we differentiate between when our hands are simply doing and when are they are contributing to communication? For example, if someone were to pick up a pen to write with, this is not a gesture but an action towards an end. If someone were to say, “The weather was awful” while fanning themselves, their gesture would be implying that the weather was awful because it was so warm, thus contributing to the communicative process.
But what about those funny in-between gesticulations? If someone says, “Yes, I’m alright,” but then happens to cross their arms, the gesture may have been unconscious but it adds a particularly telling element (the speaker’s discomfort) to the spoken statement. In this instance, the speaker may not have intended to use arm-crossing to highlight their malaise, but it popped up all the same. Since our class has approached communication as a conscious attempt at conveying particular ideas, do these automatic gestures augment or undermine the communicative process? After all, they may not always show what we had intended to show (a speaker says they feel well, but then crosses their arms, undermining their initial statement). Can we truly take responsibility for the gestures’ effects if they just “happen?”
We might file these gesticulatory responses as our hands doing something in that they seem disconnected from our communicative state. However, I think their automatic (and often revealing) appearance links them more to other “hard-wired” forms of communication such as laughing or crying, both of which are wont to appear without a conscious invocation. So where do the intentional acts of communication stop and the unconscious neurological attempts at elaboration begin?
I use gesture all the time, particularly my hands. I’m very aware of it and in fact I sometimes try intentionally to include specific gestures or increase the number and vehemence with which I gesture. One important cause of this is definitely my acting background. I’ve done a lot of work with active communication techniques and I understand the impulses behind a lot of natural gestures. This is made intentional particularly when I am presenting, because I make other conscious decisions like not wandering about the space (a terrible habit to have onstage), not shifting my weight, and not putting my hands in my pockets or folding my arms or things like that (all involve “closing” which make it hard for the audience to connect with the action). Forcing myself to stand still and look at my audience encourages me to fill the space with expansive hand motions instead. I’ve also in the past purposefully picked up hand gestures that I find visually interesting from people around me, mostly just to try them out; I see no real benefit in one hand orientation over another when the overall visual effect is the same, but I definitely have noticed that some gestures look more cute, sassy, or sophisticated than others. Being an actor tends to make you hyper-aware of your motions and how other people react to them, so to me it’s no surprise that a large quantity of my casual gestures are relatively deliberate and resemble the gestures of the storyteller more than anything.
Hand gestures seems to be both an extension to what you are saying, but also revealing when considered how you use them. I was told, when I was being unruly in a museum, to “keep your hands behind your back.” I think humans are very tactile and want to touch as much as emulate touch with their hands. Many of the gestures we use are mimes, prop-less actions (in the Apple commercial, plugging in, arranging pictures). With the exception of pointing, I feel like most of our gestures are symbolic and carry meaning beyond the basic motor skill. Two fingers for a gun or peace sign carry heavy symbolism, as well as literal meaning. Gesture can also reveal personal details. If someone uses very intrusive, jabbing gestures, they are likely aggressive, but slow, loose gestures may be revealing of a more passive person.
My hands normally find more solid objects to rest on/in (pockets, book, cup), so they don’t wave around a lot, but when I see sweets, I will be the first to wave my hands around.
I had some problems accessing the second video- if anyone else did here’s the link. What I thought was really interesting was that in the first video we see intentional hand gestures, and in the second video unintentional ones. But I really couldn’t tell the difference. The storyteller’s movements are more exaggerated perhaps, but that has more to do with the nature of what he’s saying than the intentionality of his gestures.
Last night I was talking to a friend on the phone, telling her a story I’d made up about a boy and a snowball. I was about three-quarters through when she stopped me and asked why I sounded out of breath. “Oh”. I said. “I was acting out the story. I guess you couldn’t see that.”
I’m not an idiot. I know how a telephone works and I know that my imaginary snowball fight did nothing to enhance the story as my friend heard it, and probably made me look silly to anyone in the College Center who could see me. But I did it anyway without even thinking about it. This makes me think that although with a certain amount of determination we can decide what gestures we use or even not to use any at all, that we develop language in coordination with our body and motor functions, particularly in the arms and hands.
It’s funny reading after my class today, where I took an almost unconscious note of the fact that when I was talking about “baselines,” I moved my hands palm-downward in a horizontal motion. At the time, my mind briefly flickered to this fact without almost fully recognizing it–I never would have thought twice about it until reading this blog.
The fact that everyone, within the realm of capability, uses their hands while talking is an interesting one. As mentioned, we’re not even really aware of what we’re doing with our hands until our attention and awareness has been drawn to our body gestures. Deacon talks a lot about the different parts of the brain and their respective functions and processes–I would like to know how gestures fit into this cognitive scheme. He says, “The contributions of prefrontal areas to learning all involve, in one way or another, the analysis of higher-order associative relationships” (264). Would these supplementary hand gestures be connected with this type of symbolic associations?
I think another point to consider is the culturally linguistic aspect of hand gestures. For example, one metaphor in the English language is “life is a journey.” If we wave our hand outward while talking about life, we might be indicating this concept of traveling a certain distance in response to this cultural metaphor. I would argue that the way our language shapes our mentalities and perceptions of the world is a power factor in how we use expressive hand gestures–a topic that I think would absolutely fascinating.
As Deacon notes, some scholars have pointed to the supposedly universal habit of ‘using spatial metaphors to refer to semantic dimensions (e.g., “higher truth,” “further developed,” “distantly related.”)…’ as the ‘result of innate cognitive concepts’ (p. 120). If spatial thinking is somehow integral to the cognitive process of understanding language, then gestures, which utilize space to convey meaning, seem a natural outgrowth of this innate tendency. HOWEVER, Deacon suggests that this tendency (and many others) is not innate at all, rather, it is an evolutionary linguistic development borne from the biases and limitations of the human brain. In this case, gestures are not necessarily universal, but emergent from specific environments where the biases and limitations of the human brain (which might themselves be universal) come into play. In this case, specific gestures might not necessarily be translatable — this, of course, is supported by anecdotal evidence. And so the trouble one might encounter using native gestures in a foreign land may point to the idea that yes, gestures are important for everyday communication.
But this brings me to one question. What are the differences between ‘attention-getting’ gestures and symbolic ones? Are the former perhaps more universally applicable?
One thing I’ve always found interesting about gestures is that I almost never notice how much I’m gesturing as it always feels natural. However, as soon as I start thinking about it, every gesture immediately feels weird. I noticed that I tend to either over-gesture or not gesture at all when I do presentations for classes. If I over-rehearse, I tend to be very aware of what I am doing and saying and as a result I am very aware of where my hands are; I tend to keep them at my sides. If I am talking about something that interests me or that I haven’t rehearsed every word of, I use a lot of gestures.
In response to Jenna’s question about how gesturing affects our everyday communication, I think that gestures definitely aid in communication. They can add nuances (similar to the way tone of voice does) that might not be communicated through speech alone. I wonder if people who use sign language to communicate interpret language differently as they cannot use gestures in addition to words. Their words are gestures. Do they lose a level of features or nuances that aid in communication? I doubt it. I think that gestures, although helpful, are not completely necessary for full understanding.
I think that part of the reason we gesture so much is that it is a trait that has simply continued as we evolved. As Jenna mentioned, apes gesture. It is possible that we gesture simply because it was never selected out. Our common ancestor probably gestured, so we gesture. Although we do not need it for communication anymore because we have language, there is no evolutionary reason for gesturing to disappear.