Amazing stuff! Getting to the very essence and beginnings of human language?
"... new research hints at a shared, universal non-verbal communication system that comes to life when we gesture without talking. ...
However, when describing the same scenes without speaking, the sequences of the children's hand gestures were remarkably similar. The language-specific differences in gestures had seemingly evaporated.
... also found similarly in earlier work with adults: blind English and Turkish speakers organized their gestures the same as sighted speakers did when they refrained from speaking.
Past studies in German and English-speaking children have also found silent gestures don't necessarily follow the structure of a person's native language, however those studies didn't directly compare different language speakers like this new one did.
... suggest their findings, although tentative, hint at the possibility that we all share some rudimentary non-verbal communication system that gets overridden or altered once we start learning language. ..."
"... all the studies have produced very similar results. In fact, many of the gestures used by participants resemble what are known as “home sign systems,” which are informal sign language systems that are created spontaneously by deaf children, who have not been exposed to a conventional sign language by their hearing parents. ..."
From the abstract:
"Adults display cross-linguistic variability in their speech in how they package and order semantic elements of a motion event. These differences can also be found in speakers’ co-speech gestures (gesturing with speech), but not in their silent gestures (gesturing without speech). Here, we examine when in development children show the differences between co-speech gesture and silent gesture found in adults. We studied speech and gestures produced by 100 children learning English or Turkish (n = 50/language) – equally divided into 5 age-groups: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, and 11–12 years. Children were asked to describe three-dimensional spatial event scenes (e.g., a figure crawling across carpet) first with speech and then without speech using their hands. We focused on physical motion events that elicit, in adults, cross-linguistic differences in co-speech gesture and cross-linguistic similarities in silent gesture. We found the adult pattern even in the youngest children: (1) Language shaped co-speech gesture beginning at age 3 years, showing an early effect of language on thinking for speaking (as measured by gestures that occur during the speech act). (2) Language did not affect silent gesture at any age, highlighting early limits on the effects language has on thinking and revealing a language of gesture that shows similarities across languages."
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