Mmm. I see just what I want. Now. How do I tell the waiter?
Which came first, speech or gesture? That question comes up often in discussions of speech origins, but an article by Susan Goldin-Meadow in the current issue of Child Development (abstract here) suggests the question may be beside the point. Speech and gesture go together today and probably always have. Something else came first.
Last week's post discussed that article in another context, but there is much more to say about the report. We know that gesture accompanies speech in ordinary experience. Sometimes it works like tone of voice, expressing emotion. It also works as an alternate vocabulary. Some common gesture sentences:
She's [gesture: hand goes down outlining a curved shape.]
Look [pointing gesture]!
That's enough [gesture: hand straight out, palm up]
Oh [gesture: hand waving away something]
Gestures vary from language to language. Beckoning gestures in one culture can be insults in another. The American thumbing gesture of the would-be-hitchhiker is replaced in East Africa by a hand out, palm down, pumping up and down gesture.
Gestures are also handy when a person doesn't know a word. Tourists in a land where they don't speak the language will point. "Que est que c'est?" says the American in a Parisian cafe while pointing to something on the pastry cart. "Un napoleon," says the waiter. The tourist nods and says, "Okay, un napoleon." He has actually managed to order something while using a French name.
Goldin-Meadow argues that exactly this kind of pointing/learning is a critical element of infant language acquisition. She reports that it is possible to predict much of an infant's vocabulary today by knowing where previously it pointed. A typical interaction at 11 months is for a child to make a sound and point to something. The sound attracts a mother's attention and she, in response to the gesture, says, "Oh, a ball." The next thing you know the infant is saying, "ba," for the ball. This pointing/learning process makes the growth of a child's vocabulary much less mysterious than it sometimes seems. Infants are not just picking up words at random. Like tourists in Paris, they are pointing out things that interest them and learning their names.
Goldin-Meadow also reports that pointing precedes the introduction of two-words sentences.
... gesture also paves the way for early sentences. Children combine pointing gestures with words to express sentence-like meanings (‘‘eat’’+ point at cookie) months before they can express these same meanings in a word+word combination (‘‘eat cookie’’). Importantly, the age at which children first produce gesture+speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word utterances. [p. 741]
Two-word utterances have long been considered a kind of intellectual breakthrough for toddlers, the transition point from speaking words to speaking sentences. Now it appears that thinking in chunks comes sooner than previously realized. It might be interesting to re-examine the chimpanzee sign-language data to see if there is any evidence of this kind of interaction. The Nim Chimpsky work concluded that Nim showed no interest in initiating speech. The presence or absence of pointing/learning generally in the various chimp teaching experiments would be helpful in confirming or disconfirming a general lack of interest in learning language by drawing attention to things.
Goldin-Meadow also speculates that gesture may have beneficial cognitive effects:
Work on older school-aged children solving math problems has found that encouraging children to produce gestures conveying a correct problem-solving
strategy increases the likelihood that those children will solve the problem correctly. These findings suggest that the act of gesturing can promote learning. Similarly, when learning language, the act of pointing to an object might itself make it more likely that the pointer will learn a word for that object. [p. 742]
This link between gesture and learning is not especially mysterious. Pointing focuses attention, including the attention of the pointer. It makes me wonder if all those adults who tell their children, "It's not polite to point," are telling them not to be interested in things.
Except in cases of deaf children, children do not seem to string pointing gestures together into sentences. Typically the process of acquiring speech is to use single pointing to draw attention to something, learn the things name, and go on. Gesture and speech go together.
At this point I'm saying to myself, I need to understand better just how chimpanzees point and the difference between their pointing, which does not lead to speech or even much joint attention, and our pointing that does translate into shared attention, learning, and speech. That difference is likely to be crucial in understanding what we had to acquire in order to become the speaking species.
Hi,
Concerning your final remark: "At this point I'm saying to myself, I need to understand better just how chimpanzees point..."
On the Tomasello homepage
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/index.html
several of his 'recent publications' (downloadable pdfs) treat this subject.
Posted by: Peter | June 17, 2007 at 06:26 AM
A very interesting article by Michael Arbib deals with this issue:
Arbib, Michael A. "Co-Evolution of Human Consciousness and Language." In Cajal and Consciousness: Scientific Approaches to Consciousness on the Centennial of Ramón y Cajal's TEXTURA. Ed. Pedro C. Marijuán. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2001. 195-220.
In the link above I comment on the paper - in Spanish, alas.
Posted by: JoseAngel | March 28, 2008 at 05:22 PM