Gesture: A Slim Guide - Five Fun Facts
To celebrate the publication of Gesture: A Slim Guide I've selected five facts from/about the book to share:
1. The cover is a deepcut reference to my first gesture research project
Gawne & Kelly (2014) is actually work from my honours project in 2007 - it took us a while to write it up for publication. In that experiment, participants watched a short video narrative and marked everything they thought was a 'gesture' without being given a definition. On the whole, people agree at a minimum level with Gesture Studies researchers about what a gesture is, but tend to include far more in their definition. The cover illustration from Lucy Maddox captures some of the key gestures from that video. Because we had no budget, I filmed the video of myself narrating the story.
2. Learning a signed language will affect the way you gesture in spoken language
Research on learners of ASL shows that learning a signed language affects the gestures of people who have spent their whole life speaking English. Gesture and signed languages are two very different uses of the same modality, but they influence each other in interesting ways.
3. You can make people imagine emphasis differently by changing the placement of emphatic gestures
Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters created experimental video clips that you can see here. They took inspiration for their experimental work from the classic McGurk effect in phonetics, where watching a mouth closing like a /g/ while a /b/ sound is played will make the viewer hear a /d/.
4. Dolphins and seals demonstrate the capacity to follow human pointing gestures
While there is evidence that many domestic animals can follow human pointing gestures, this is the only documented evidence to date that shows this skill in wild animals that aren't primates.
5. People still gesture even if their audience can't see them, but the way they gesture changes
Speech and gesture are so closely linked up that we can't help but gesture, even if our audience can't see us. Experiments show that changing the audience conditions changes how large or frequent gestures are, but nothing stops us gesturing completely.
The official launch party for Gesture: A Slim Guide will be the April episode of Lingthusiasm, stay tuned!
The gestures that we use when we speak are an important, if often over-looked, part of how we communicate. This book provides a friendly, fast-paced introduction to the field of Gesture Studies. Gestures are those communicative actions made with the human body that accompany spoken or signed language. Paying attention to gesture means paying attention to the fuller context in which humans communicate. Gesture is absolute, in that every human community that has language also has gestures as part of that language. But gesture is also relative, in that it is far more heavily context dependent than other elements of communication. This book provides a broad introduction to current understandings of the nature and function of gesture as a feature of communication. This Slim Guide covers the ways gesture works alongside speech and the different categories of gesture. The way these categories are used varies across cultures and languages, and even across specific interactions. We acquire gesture as part of language, and it is deeply entwined with language in the brain. Gesture has an important role in the origin of language, and in shaping the future of human communication. The study of gesture makes a crucial interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of human communication. This Slim Guide provides an introduction to Gesture Studies for readers of all backgrounds.
