When Gesture Becomes Analogy

Abstract

Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner (, ) observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies. Mirroring this logic, we observe that some metaphoric gestures represent attributes and others represent relations, and propose to call the latter analogical gestures. We provide examples of such analogical gestures and show how they relate to the categories of iconic and metaphoric gestures described previously. Analogical gestures represent different types of relations and different degrees of relational complexity, and sometimes cohere into larger analogical models. Treating analogical gestures as a distinct phenomenon prompts new questions and predictions, and illustrates one way that the study of gesture and the study of analogy can be mutually informative.

Speech and Gesture Production Provide Unique Insights Into Young Children’s Spatial Reasoning

“…To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess relations between gesture production and SA performance. Analogical reasoning and gestures were traditionally studied separately, but recent work showed that people use analogical gestures (Cooperrider & Goldin-Meadow, 2017). By using both SA and CMTT tasks, we evaluated whether there were similarities in the mechanisms underlying performance across tasks.…”

Having a different pointing of view about the future: The effect of signs on co-speech gestures about time in Mandarin–CSL bimodal bilinguals

“…Furthermore, given that spontaneous gestures are a window into people's spatio-temporal thinking (e.g., Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Cienki, 1998; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), providing a “vivid and naturalistic source of evidence for the use of space in abstract reasoning” (visualising thought) (Cooperrider, Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2016; Cooperrider & Goldin-Meadow, 2017; Tversky, 2011), the study of co-speech temporal gestures by late bimodal bilinguals may reveal the effect of cross-modal spatial metaphors of time on people's mental space-time mappings. Thus this study can show the cross-linguistic influence of an L2 on an L1 and may further help clarify the problem of the restructuring of temporal conceptualisation after learning an L2.…”

Does Gesture Lighten the Load? The Case of Verbal Analogies

“…One reason for choosing analogies is that simply, verbal analogies are a different type of task than the spatial and mathematical problem-solving tasks that are often used in this type of work. Gestures can represent analogical relationships (Cooperrider and Goldin-Meadow, 2017) and have the potential to encourage a variety of different iconic, deictic, and beat gestures. Further, there is no set procedural formula to solve an analogy and they require the problem solver to consider non-abstract information.…”