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Gesture, sign and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015
How does sign language compare to gesture, on the one hand, and to spoken language on the other? At one time, sign was viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures with no linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the last 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We come to the conclusion that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because, at the moment, it is difficult to tell where sign stops and where gesture begins, we suggest that sign sh...
Reinterpreting Gesture as Language. Language "in Action".
At present, the enquiry on gesture has reached its maturity as a branch of studies which endorses a multidisciplinary approach to communication. Notwithstanding its spread into a great number of sciences (Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Ethnology, among others), in recent times little attention has been paid to the phenomena involved, as far as the linguistic point of view is concerned. In particular, the communicative function of gesture has not been addressed enough by a strictly linguistic point of view. The aim of the present volume is to exploit some methodological instruments provided by Linguistics in order to devolve this subject to its genuine pertinence. Such a project implies the use of those empirical methodological tools to which psychologists (and also linguists) are familiar. In doing so, the data presented here are analysed as pieces of information that describe behaviour, that are also an integral part of the more complex phenomenon of human communication. To the extent that a study of this kind deals with gesture, a number of theoretical linguistic questions must be solved. The major claim of this book is that gesture and speech share the same cognitive, psychological and physiological roots. In fact, gesture will here be claimed to be integral to human language, its function within human communication being as much goal-directed (MacKay, 1972) - and, subsequently, communicative – as speech. Evidence for this assumption is provided by means of experiments on hearing and deaf subjects, in addition to a review of the major findings about the use and function of gesture in situations of handicap, such as aphasia and blindness. The ideas proposed here are a result of a long speculation on the role of gesture in communicative acts, on the one hand, and with respect to language, on the other hand, matured during my decennial professorship of Non-Verbal Communication, which began at the University of Pavia and is now continuing in Italy and abroad.
Looking at Sign Language as a Visual and Gestural Shorthand
Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2000
In this paper I will compare and contrast sign language (used by the deaf community) and spoken language from the point of view of semiotics and linguistics. Both signed and spoken languages can be defined as: a system of systems -revolving around the notion of the linguistic sign -used by human beings to communicate. Both languages also share a common goal: to achieve maximum communication with minimal effort. Where they differ, however, is in the way they produce the meaningful signs to create an efficient system of communication and in the nature of these meaningful signs regarding arbitrariness versus iconicity. Spoken language is based on phonemes that are in opposition to each other which are arbitrary and possess no meaning of their own -but combine into larger meaningful units such as morphemes, words, etc. Thus spoken language is fundamentally auditory and arbitrary . Sign language is based on units that represent a combination of hand-shapes and gestures which have an orientation and movement to various parts of the body -all of which not only possess meaning -but are iconic rather than arbitrary in nature. Thus sign language is fundamentally visual and iconic . Therefore it is our contention that the traditional concepts of spoken language are neither appropriate nor suitable for sign language and a different approach to analyze sign language will be suggested in this paper.
Visnyk of Lviv University. Philology Series. Issue 52, 88-103. L'viv, 2011. (Вісник Львівського університету. Серія філологічна.Випуск 52. Львів, 2011). (ISSN 2078-5534)
The spontaneous gesticulation that accompanies speech is an integral part of the linguistic system. Movements of the body are made in conjunction with speech to produce meanings and perform a num- ber of essential discourse functions. Gesture is ‘gestural action’ and gesture symbolism is dynamic, schematic and imagistic. Gestures don’t just ‘depict’ but actually ‘do things’: they shape ideas and fuel thought; they describe or report scenes; they give directions; they expose, report, and sum up argu- ments; they achieve textual cohesion and regulate communicative interaction. Gestures are a window into the mind. As gestures are made, visible kinetic form is given to invisible mental representations and hidden cognitive mechanisms. As hands move within the gesture space, objets of conception are created, and cognitive processing is ‘acted out,’ using symbolic acts of pointing and manipulation. Key cognitive abilities are revealed in the process: the ability to construe ideas and events as objects and substances (conceptual reification); the ability to form image-schematic representations of ‘things’ and movements, and to use these iconically or metaphoricially; the ability to make symbolic uses of space. Gestures are also found to play a central role in the expression of grammatical meanings and mecha- nisms. Thus grammar and gesture are clearly integrated in the expression of temporal dimensions, aspectual notions and modal stances. Gesture activity is also shown to be involved in the expression of concession and comparison. Finally, technical and methodological dimensions of gesture-analysis are discussed. The case is made for a new, creative approach to gesture watching – the ‘language and gesture workshops’ – where students may observe and physically explore co-speech gestures, develop their own choreographic variations, and work on sound, gesture and meaning correspondence.
Language in Action The review of : Reinterpreting Gesture as Language . Language " in Action
2012
With the increasing awareness of neural links between gesture and language, the traditional distinction between “linguistic” and “gestural” behaviour has become less clear. Gestures share many traits with certain components of speech (especially prosody) and some of their aspects are studied on a relatively similar methodological basis (Gibbon 2011). Yet, the integration of gesture studies and linguistics remains a challenging task. It is not only the question of unified terminology. Nicla Rossini, the author of the book under review, has a strong academic background in linguistics but most of her research has been devoted to non-verbal communication. Her work clearly draws on the pioneers of gesture studies (McNeill, Kendon) and traditional linguistics, but, simultaneously, it is strongly driven by the cognitivist way of thinking and recent advances in neuroscience. The cognitive-neuroscientific perspective seems to offer a platform where speech and gesture can be studied jointly i...
Language in the Visual Modality: Co-speech Gesture and Sign Language
Human Language
Co speech Gesture and Sign Language ASLI ÖZYÜREK AND BENCIE WOLL traditions of lit er a ture, recently there have been attempts to achieve a joint perspective that seeks to understand the role of the visual modality in language in general by studying both gesture and sign (e.g., Goldin Meadow & Brentari, 2015; Perniss, Özyürek, & Morgan, 2015). Studies comparing hearing speakers' gestures with sys tems used in emerging sign languages and homesign systems (e.g., Goldin Meadow, 2003; Senghas, Kita, & Özyürek, 2004) have shown that as gestures move toward sign language, idiosyncratic gestures used with speech are replaced by conventionalized expressions, and linguistic properties increase (McNeill, 1992). Unlike co speech gestures, sign languages are com plete linguistic systems exhibiting linguistic structure and language specific constraints at the phonological, morphological, lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels. Even though sign languages differ from gestures in significant ways, there is now a clearer understanding that the pragmatic, semantic, and cognitive functions employed by co speech gestures during the use of spo ken languages are also evident in the use of sign lan guages. Furthermore there are similarities arising from the iconic and indexical properties afforded by the visual modality and these properties may be difficult to express within the auditory affordances of the speech channel. The joint perspective that we will adopt here may shed new light on how communication in the visual modality reflects modality specific as well as modality independent aspects of our language capacity and on the extent to which a common cognitive and neural architecture underpins linguistic and nonlinguistic communication across modalities. 1. Visual Modality in Spoken Language: Co-speech Gestures Kendon (2004) defined gestures as vis i ble actions of the hand, body, and face that are intentionally used to
Cognitive linguistics and gesture
The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 2021
The contemporary interdisciplinary domain of gesture studies is heavily rooted in the cognitive linguistics enterprise (Evans, Bergen & Zinken, 2007), especially concerning its “cognitive commitment” (Lakoff, 1990: 40), aligning gesture research within research on cognition. There is a growing body of literature highlighting that gesture may very well be part of language competence, playing a decisive role in language evolution and development (see infra). The dual cognitive and social function of gestures is the primary focus in gesture studies, with gestural phenomena being viewed as offering “a window into the mind” and playing a vital role in social interactions. After providing a historical perspective and a brief overview of some fundamentals of gesture studies, this chapter will focus on functional and formal aspects found in gesture studies highlighting their relationship with cognitive linguistics. The chapter will then discuss the need for research on gestural meaning-making, or “gesture phonology”, and gesture categorisation before highlighting future directions in the area of human computer interaction.
Topics in cognitive science, 2015
For humans, the ability to communicate and use language is instantiated not only in the vocal modality but also in the visual modality. The main examples of this are sign languages and (co-speech) gestures. Sign languages, the natural languages of Deaf communities, use systematic and conventionalized movements of the hands, face, and body for linguistic expression. Co-speech gestures, though non-linguistic, are produced in tight semantic and temporal integration with speech and constitute an integral part of language together with speech. The articles in this issue explore and document how gestures and sign languages are similar or different and how communicative expression in the visual modality can change from being gestural to grammatical in nature through processes of conventionalization. As such, this issue contributes to our understanding of how the visual modality shapes language and the emergence of linguistic structure in newly developing systems. Studying the relationship ...
Past and current trends in sign language research
Language & Communication, 2006
Until very recently a large part of the research in sign linguistics concentrated on the similarities between spoken languages and sign languages. Today, the (presumed) uniqueness of sign languages is given increasingly more attention and it is not taken for granted any longer that spoken language research instruments (theories, categories, notions…) automatically ‘fit’ sign language research. As a result, sign language researchers are being confronted with a number of fundamental questions, such as questions about the nature of gestural–visual languages. It is shown here that their answers have implications beyond the domain of sign linguistics.