Which Came First, the Word or the Gesture?

I got a good laugh out of this cartoon on Alex Baker's Cake or Death cartoon file. And it fits in with this post's point: gestures have their limits. Susan Goldin-Meadow is a hero on this blog because her work is both serious and original. It fills a gap in our understanding. In 2008 she presented a report on gesture that has stayed with me. It made clear that gestures are a natural way of illustrating what is not included in a grammatical structure. For example, a person might say, "The plane ride was very…" and then illustrate the ride by moving the hand horizontally while simultaneously bouncing it up and down. Ever since that presentation I have been of the fixed opinion that gesture has, from speech's beginning, accompanied spoken words. So naturally I was pleased to see that Goldin-Meadow has published a paper titled "Widening the Lens" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – B (abstract; paper). It summarizes her work. The paper also settles a matter I have often wondered about: sign language users also add gestures to their signing. "Like the gestures that accompany speech, the gestures that accompany sign are analogue in form, and thus complement the discrete, segmented categories found in sign (and speech)." [p. 2] Since apes gesture in the wild, it is often proposed that gesture led to speech, but we need to find a process that might link the two. Apes, after all, don't go on to speak, so why did we? Goldin-Meadow's paper suggests possible ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs