Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker?

Abstract

Speakers of all languages gesture, but there are differences in the gestures that they produce. Do speakers learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by learning to speak a particular language? We examined this question by studying the speech and gestures produced by 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English and Turkish (n = 20/language), and comparing them with the speech and gestures of 40 sighted adult speakers in each language (20 wearing blindfolds, 20 not wearing blindfolds). We focused on speakers' descriptions of physical motion, which display strong cross-linguistic differences in patterns of speech and gesture use. Congenitally blind speakers of English and Turkish produced speech that resembled the speech produced by sighted speakers of their native language. More important, blind speakers of each language used gestures that resembled the gestures of sighted speakers of that language. Our results suggest that hearing a particular language is sufficient to gesture like a native speaker of that language.

Blind Speakers Show Language‐Specific Patterns in Co‐Speech Gesture but Not Silent Gesture

“…Asking participants to gesture in the co‐speech condition allowed us to maximize the chances of attaining equal numbers of blind and sighted participants who gestured in each of our two languages. Our decision to provide explicit instruction to gesture was supported by previous work showing that telling speakers to gesture on a task increased the number of gestures they produced, but did not change the nature of those gestures (Cook et al., ; Özçalışkan, Lucero, & Goldin‐Meadow, ,b).…”

Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework

“…In contrast, if their language tends to express path and manner in a single clause with only one verb (as in satellite-framed languages), speakers typically produce gestures that express both path and manner simultaneously. This tendency to segment or conflate gestures for path and manner in the same way they are packaged in speech is present even among speakers who have been blind from birth, suggesting that experience seeing speakers gesture in a particular way is not necessary for the pattern to emerge (Özçalışkan, Lucero, & Goldin-Meadow, 2016b).…”

Language contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain language specific gesture patterns in each language

“…However, previous studies have so far almost exclusively focused on the spoken modality, i.e., speech. Language production, nonetheless, is often multimodal and speakers tend to accompany their speech with gestures (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill, 1992), including speakers who are blind from birth (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1997; Özçalışkan, Lucero & Goldin-Meadow, 2016). There is also growing evidence that gesture and speech form a single, integrated system (McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004; see Özyürek, 2017 for a review).…”