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