Spontaneous Gestures - Part 1 of 3

On March 30, 2011, I attended a presentation presented by the CSUN Linguistics Club, “I Know What You’re Thinking: What Spontaneous Gestures Tell Us About Language and Thought,” by Evelyn McClave, Ph.D.

Dr. McClave is currently a professor of Linguistics and Deaf Studies at California State University at Northridge (CSUN). She is
 fluent in American Sign Language and has done linguistic research as it pertains 
to Deaf Studies.

The lecture focused on McClave’s research on gestures, particularly on as she explained, “. . . spontaneous gestures that hearing people make and don’t even think about what they’re doing. They are beyond the level conscious of recall.”

These gestures do not have any conventionalized forms. She ruled out emblems—the “thumbs up” gesture to represent approval or the index and thumb touch to form the “okay” symbol. McClave explained, “What I am looking at are these unconscious gestures and the basic assumptions we make are the same assumptions all scientists make and, number one, there are underlying patterns waiting to be discovered. Sure enough, we have found them. The second assumption that all of us make is that our body movements are not random. Believe it or not, we can actually predict what kind of body movements you’re going to make usually in certain circumstances.”

Early observations in the gesture field were made during the 1980s. Describing the first work by Adam Kendon, one of the top authorities on gestures, McClave said, “Speakers gesture, not listeners. So it tends to be the person talking who is moving his or her hands. Not the person/people who are listening.” She continued, “. . . gesture and speech are semantically coherent, co-expressive.” McClave demonstrated the gesture of holding a baseball bat but referred to a tennis match. She explained if this were done, the speaker would correct himself in the direction of the gesture, not the utterance—the gesture is always right.

McClave reiterated that gestures are connected to the thought expressed. She micro analyzes at one-thirtieth of a second because video goes by at thirty frames per second. She and her team, “. . . found the gesture will line up with the co-expressive part of the speech, but, it always either precedes it or comes right down on that beat where that speech is co-expressive.”