The repertoire and intentionality of gestural communication in wild chimpanzees

Speech and gesture are two vital components of communication. Gesture itself provides an external support to speech, potentially promoting comprehension of a spoken message. The question of whether gesture promotes comprehension is not new, with research dating back to the 1970s. However, when gestures are most beneficial to comprehension is poorly understood. This meta-analysis explored 2 questions: whether and when gestures benefit comprehension of verbal information. We examined the effect sizes of 83 independent samples. Within each sample, a learner's comprehension was measured when gestures accompanied speech, compared with speech alone. Across all samples, gesture had a moderate, beneficial effect on comprehension when either produced or observed by a learner. Further stratified tests revealed that gestures significantly benefitted comprehension under a variety of circumstances, dependent on the type of gesture used, the information provided by gesture, the function of the gesture, the age of the learner, and the way comprehension was measured. The function of the gesture moderated the magnitude of the effect, with studies investigating the effect of producing gestures on comprehension yielding significantly larger effect sizes on average than studies investigating the effect of observing gestures on comprehension. The results from the current meta-analysis have theoretical and practical implications for gesture-related research and highlight new avenues for future studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

PsycINFO

10.1037/bul0000202

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Deictic and other gestures in infancy

Acción Psicológica (2010)

Ulf Liszkowski

The paper reviews studies on prelinguistic infants' gestures and the evidence for deictic and for symbolic gestural communication before language. First, recent and new studies demonstrate that prelinguistic infants communicate in complex ways with deictic gestures, in particular pointing, and that pointing is closely related to the emergence of language. These ontogenetic findings thus support gestural origins and social-pragmatic accounts of human communication and show that human communication emerges first in deictic gestures and is based on social-cognitive and motivational skills that run much deeper than language alone. Second, however, a review of other, non-deictic gestures suggests that prelinguistic infants use these other gestures initially low-frequently, non-representationally, and with little or no direct relation to language. These findings qualify gestural origins accounts and suggest, based on the cognitive complexities underlying the symbolic use of manual actions, that fully representational gestures instead emerge after, or even because of language, and possibly as co-speech gestures. The review of the evidence both supports and challenges gestural origins accounts of language and provides a differentiated perspective on gestures in the ontogeny -and likewise evolution- of language.

Deixis

10.5944/ap.7.2.212

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Ptilosis of the House Wren (Troglodytes aedon aedon)

Ornithology (1927)

Rudyerd Boulton

Troglodytes

10.2307/4074690

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Two hands and a tale: When gestures benefit adult narrative comprehension