Spontaneous Gestures - Part 3 of 3

(Continuation of Part 1 & 2)

McClave concluded her discussion of gestures by delineating their different dimensions: “In a nutshell, that is what gestures tell us, the manual gestures.” She then went on to explain, “We also looked at head movements, because it turns out that people move their heads in predictable ways in American culture.”

One example of head movement showing meaning was when people said anything that was inclusive such as “all,” “whole,” or “completely.” There would be a lateral sweep of the head on the word. McClave hypothesized this happened because with the earth’s gravity, many things are arranged horizontally.

McClave showed us video clips from a study conducted at CSUN with four of her graduate students. They set out to prove that the head sweep was worldwide, not just in America. They analyzed head movements of Arabic, Korean, and Bulgarian speakers. In addition, to rule out the influence of Hollywood, they studied the people of Turkana, a group of nomadic pastoralists in northwest Kenya. McClave concluded, “The data is showing around the world; we can’t claim it’s universal because no linguist would ever try to do that, but we can claim we’re seeing it all over the world with no exposure to American culture, to television or anything else. We’re finding this sweep, lateral sweep. What does this tell us? We hypothesize that humans can conceptualize something that is absent or even abstract as being positioned in space. This has amazing implications for ASL because this is exactly what ASL it still does. It positions something abstract in space and then makes the sign for it, sets that it up and then keeps pointing to that same space to represent that entity. Well it turns out, and by the way, everyone thought this was peculiar to sign languages. Sign language made this up. Turns out we’re all doing it. What probably happened, again the hypothesis is, signers are incredibly observant; they are watching you like no one else because they need every clue they can get for communication to be successful. So, it means that maybe what happened was signers? saw all of us doing this, were able to pick up on the nonverbal and then use these nonverbal cues that hearing have in order to grammaticize in ASL. Just a theory, but I’m sticking with it at this point.”

Another thing they discovered in their study of people around the world: speakers moved their heads or make gestures for each individual item on a list. McClave showed us more video clips of these examples.

McClave discussed intensification—lateral back and forth head movement—with us. Research by Chuck and Candy Goodwin and Manny Schegloff, at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that lateral head shakes mark assessments whether good or bad. Linguists assumed the origin was something with a negative comment. McClave postulates a different origin. She explained her hypothesis thusly, “The lateral sweep is to show an array of objects. Remember? We said, well, if it sweeps you’re going this way. Well, if you intensified something, there is more if it, right? So, then if you’re going back and forth, there’s just more and more to see.”

McClave continued, “. . . this is more evidence that we conceptualize abstract or absent entities as position in space, how the mind is actually working. By the way, this fits beautifully with theories from Berkeley where George Lakoff said that we think metaphorically, basically all of our thinking its metaphoric. So, this fits beautifully with this. We are positioning things in space, again supporting these theories. We also find that this relates to ASL. We found speakers showing image sizes depending on the head movements, the size of the entity. And by the way, what ASL does this too. If you’re giving something to a tall person in ASL you go up. If you’re giving something to a short person in ASL, you’re going down, to a child.” She then demonstrates giving something to a short person but looking up, explaining that it is ungrammatical in ASL to do that.

The last topic discussed was back-channeling—giving cues to a speaker that we are listening. Back-channeling was first noticed by Victor Yngve at the University of Chicago in 1970. It is assumed the listener back-channels when he or she feels like it. However, McClave discovered going over her data, speakers nod when there was nothing to nod at. She started to look at the listener. She commented, “The minute the speaker went down like this, within one second the listener would back-channel.” They found this in other languages.

McClave closed with, “What did all of this tell us? It tells us in the gesture world, we need to rethink utterance. To depend only on speech, you have no idea, really what, whether you’ve gotten the thought. A lot of the information is coming across on the gestural channel and we’re finding out that people, even though they are not aware it, are responding to it.”