Thinking with Your Hands by Susan Goldin-Meadow

Author:Susan Goldin-Meadow [Goldin-Meadow, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

The adult described the scene by saying, “The doughnut jumped out of the ashtray,” while producing the following movements with his hands (see next page).

When asked to describe the same event without speech, he produced a string of clearly articulated gestures: two gestures for the ashtray (SMOKE, STUB-OUT), a gesture for the doughnut (ROUND), and a gesture for the action (ARC-OUT) (see illustration here).

The only gesture that looked the same in the two renditions was the ARC-OUT gesture, and the adult’s co-speech ARC-OUT was much less complete than his silent ARC-OUT, in which his right hand shaped like a circle (representing the doughnut) arced out of his flat left hand (representing the ashtray).

The silent gestures were different from co-speech gesture in another way. The co-speech gestures, if connected at all, did not follow a consistent ordering. The silent gestures did. This adult, and all of the other adults in the study, produced gestures for the stationary location first (the ashtray), the moving object second (the doughnut), and the action last (the arc). Note that this order is not the default order found in English: we would say, “The doughnut jumped out of the ashtray,” not “Out of the ashtray the doughnut jumped.” These differences underscore the versatility of our hands—they are typically used along with our speech to enrich what we say, but they can be instantly transformed into a system that takes on the full communicative burden.9

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