Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language [and Comments and Reply]

Hewes, Gordon W.; Andrew, R.J.; Carini, Louis; Choe, Hackeny; Gardner, Rod; Kortlandt, Adriaan; Krantz, Grover S.; McBride, Glen; Nottebohm, Fernando; Pfeiffer, J. William; Rumbaugh, Duane G.; Steklis, Horst D.; Raliegh, Michael J.; Stopa, Roman; Suzuki, Akira; Washburn, S. L.; Wescott, Roger W.

doi:10.1086/201401

Cited by 667 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This would fit well with a gestural theory of language origins [2,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Call & Tomasello [25] show that among our closest relatives in the Hominidae, intentional communicative acts are signalled largely by non-vocal means, especially with the hands (but see [26,27] on the intentional nature of at least some great ape vocalizations).…”

Section: (A) Pragmatics As the Foundation Of Human Communicationsupporting

confidence: 72%

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Levinson

Holler

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

283

187

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One reason for the apparent gulf between animal and human communication systems is that the focus has been on the presence or the absence of language as a complex expressive system built on speech. But language normally occurs embedded within an interactional exchange of multi-modal signals. If this larger perspective takes central focus, then it becomes apparent that human communication has a layered structure, where the layers may be plausibly assigned different phylogenetic and evolutionary origins—especially in the light of recent thoughts on the emergence of voluntary breathing and spoken language. This perspective helps us to appreciate the different roles that the different modalities play in human communication, as well as how they function as one integrated system despite their different roles and origins. It also offers possibilities for reconciling the ‘gesture-first hypothesis’ with that of gesture and speech having evolved together, hand in hand—or hand in mouth, rather—as one system

show abstract

Section: (A) Pragmatics As the Foundation Of Human Communicationsupporting

confidence: 72%

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Levinson

Holler

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

283

187

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many theories of language evolution have maintained that vocalizations must have been "bootstrapped" (Fay et al, 2013), or "piggybacked" (Tomasello, 2008, p. 330) on gestures "because of the vastly greater possibility for iconic productivity in the visual medium" (Armstrong & Wilcox, 2007, p. 123; see also, e.g., Corballis, 2002;Hewes, 1973). At some point in human evolution, people began to produce arbitrary vocalizations to accompany inherently meaningful iconic gestures and pointing, and through association, these vocalizations came to be independently meaningful as they conventionalized into the forms of speech.…”

Section: Iconicity and Gesture In Language Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in vocalization, comparisons with gesture, and implications for theories on the evolution of language

Perlman

Cain

2014

GEST

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scholars have often reasoned that vocalizations are extremely limited in their potential for iconic expression, especially in comparison to manual gestures (e.g., Armstrong & Wilcox, 2007;Tomasello, 2008). As evidence for an alternative view, we first review the growing body of research related to iconicity in vocalizations, including experimental work on sound symbolism, cross-linguistic studies documenting iconicity in the grammars and lexicons of languages, and experimental studies that examine iconicity in the production of speech and vocalizations. We then report an experiment in which participants created vocalizations to communicate 60 different meanings, including 30 antonymic pairs. The vocalizations were measured along several acoustic properties, and these properties were compared between antonyms. Participants were highly consistent in the kinds of sounds they produced for the majority of meanings, supporting the hypothesis that vocalization has considerable potential for iconicity. In light of these findings, we present a comparison between vocalization and manual gesture, and examine the detailed ways in which each modality can function in the iconic expression of particular kinds of meanings. We further discuss the role of iconic vocalizations and gesture in the evolution of language since our divergence from the great apes. In conclusion, we suggest that human communication is best understood as an ensemble of kinesis and vocalization, not just speech, in which expression in both modalities spans the range from arbitrary to iconic.

show abstract

“…It has been further shown that great apes have a much more flexible [44,46] and much less context-dependent gestural, compared with vocal, system of communication [47], and are able to adjust their gestural behaviours to the responses and the attentional state of the recipient [48][49][50][51][52]. These features of the gestural system have been considered as evidence of continuities with key properties of human language, such as flexibility, intentionality and referential properties, which some believe support the gestural origins theory of language evolution [53][54][55][56].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sound of one-hand clapping: handedness and perisylvian neural correlates of a communicative gesture in chimpanzees

et al. 2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Whether lateralization of communicative signalling in non-human primates might constitute prerequisites of hemispheric specialization for language is unclear. In the present study, we examined (i) hand preference for a communicative gesture (clapping in 94 captive chimpanzees from two research facilities) and (ii) the in vivo magnetic resonance imaging brain scans of 40 of these individuals. The preferred hand for clapping was defined as the one in the upper position when the two hands came together. Using computer manual tracing of regions of interest, we measured the neuroanatomical asymmetries for the homologues of key language areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and planum temporale (PT). When considering the entire sample, there was a predominance of right-handedness for clapping and the distribution of right-and left-handed individuals did not differ between the two facilities. The direction of hand preference (right-versus left-handed subjects) for clapping explained a significant portion of variability in asymmetries of the PT and IFG. The results are consistent with the view that gestural communication in the common ancestor may have been a precursor of language and its cerebral substrates in modern humans.

show abstract

Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 667 publications

References 52 publications

The origin of human multi-modal communication

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Iconicity in vocalization, comparisons with gesture, and implications for theories on the evolution of language

The sound of one-hand clapping: handedness and perisylvian neural correlates of a communicative gesture in chimpanzees

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About