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Using recurrent gestures as the model, this essay considers how an inside-looking-out view of speech-gesture production reflects the interactive-social exterior. The inside view may appear to ignore the social context of speaking and gesture, but this is far from the truth. What an exterior view sees as important appears in the interior but in a different way. The difference leads to misunderstandings of the interior view and what it does. It is not a substitute for the exterior. It is the interior reflecting the social exterior and shaping it to fit its own demands. Topics are: recurrent gestures; gesture-speech co-expressivity; expunged real-world goals; "in-betweenness"; phenomenological "inhabitance" and material carriers; metaphoricity and imagery; social deixis and social relations; realizations of the self; world-views; and lastly the want of mutual outside and inside intellectual perceptions and what can be done about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Arbib's extension of the mirror-system hypothesis neatly sidesteps one problem with the 'gesture-first' theory of language origins, it overlooks the importance of gestures that occur in current-day human linguistic performance, and this lands it with another problem. We argue that, instead of gesture-first, a system of combined vocalization and gestures would have been a more natural evolutionary unit.

In this paper, I put forth the idea that a process in the production of speech can also be found, on an entirely different scale, in theatrical and film performance. Not simply that actors speak, but the semiotics of language, as a dynamic system, also appear, on their own, in the semiotics of theater. It forms a kind of “triangle” of gesture mimicry: actor → audience, audience → actor, and author → actor. Each leg has its own realization. Many reactions take place and are part of the performance triangle. The actor to audience portion is similar to what gesture coders do – spontaneously mimic the gesture and speech of a subject on video made even decades before. The author to actor leg is more surprising. Carefully written ‘scanable’ prose contains gesture-like imagery. Part of writing is building in gesture, not describing it but placing it as a pattern on which the written text is orchestrated. Actors can recover the author’s built-in gestures. Finally, the audience to actor leg arises when the actor mimics what have been termed ‘phantom’ gestures and bodily attitudes sensed in the audience. The triangle exists in film acting with the actor conjuring an audience of his or her own to complete it, and explains why in fact film actors do this (even endowing the camera with personal properties). The audience is active on its leg of the triangle. The audience is more complex and participatory than just watching. Overall, theatre and film have the same dialectic of semiotic opposites as gesture and language. As actors speak and gesture the performance itself, too, is a process of imagery and codified form, and they are in a dialectic unity. In this sense, in heightened and public form, theatre is a continuation (and not just an exploiter) of language, which perhaps partly explains its appeal and universality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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We extend Werner and Kaplan’s (1963) account of early language development as symbol formation to the development of cohesion in young children’s narratives. We propose that the development of cohesion relies on imagistic gestures, specifically on gestural catchments – series of gestures (not necessarily continuous) with recurring features that embody discourse themes. Our argument is supported by the narratives of a child recorded and transcribed by Forrester (2002, 2008), and available on Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). From ages 1;5 to 2;9 we find three periods of changing relationships between speech and gesture – in the first, gestures helping to create simple referring-and-predicating constructions, and in the last marking what is newsworthy relative to what has come before. The period between is a time of transition from gestures in an extralinguistic to an intralinguistic function. We examine this change in the context of Werner and Kaplan’s (1963) shift from parataxis to hypotaxis, and with respect to the semiotics of symbol formation – a shift from a single to a dual semiotic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early humans formed language units consisting of global and discrete dimensions of semiosis in dynamic opposition, or ‘growth points.’ At some point, gestures gained the power to orchestrate actions, manual and vocal, with significances other than those of the actions themselves, giving rise to cognition framed in dual terms. However, our proposal emphasizes natural selection of joint gesture-speech, not ‘gesture-first’ in language origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blindness might be described as a biological condition, and thus remedies could be in the realm of biotechnology. However, the convergence of information technology and cognitive science offers great opportunities for understanding and helping blind children as they learn mathematics, the crosscutting discipline most important for all branches of science and engineering. This article outlines our logic and approach for providing blind students with awareness of the embodiment of their teachers to maintain situated communication. First, we shall show that math discourse is inherently spatiotemporal, and that this information is carried by gesticulation in conjunction with speech. Second, we shall explore the capacity of those who are blind for the imagism necessary for mathematics reasoning. Third, we shall advance a set of augmentative devices suggested by our analysis. Finally, we shall outline our ongoing experiments to validate our rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the possibilities for observing how speech and action are synchronized and mutually shape each other. Discussion cognitive being of building aspect into action; Example of how speech and action combine to gestures associated with aspect in Mandarin and English languages; Implications for how language and gesture affect being and the implications for the brain systems that could produce the kinds of speech-action combinations.

Comparisons of spontaneous speech-synchronized gestures for the same events by monolingual speakers of English and Spanish during narrations of a cartoon story show differences in the visuospatial cognition associated with the satellite-framed and verb-framed systems of motion event encoding. These are striking differences, given the potential for uniformity of space and motion representations across languages. 1. Objectively curvilinear paths are broken into straight-line segments in English—they are unbroken and remain curvilinear in Spanish. This visuospatial difference is apparent in children as young as three years old. 2. Borders are treated like other path sequences in English—they are given special treatment in Spanish that removes them from path schematizations. 3. Manner is projected onto the figure in both English and Spanish—it is also projected onto the ground in Spanish (a unique resource of visuospatial cognition in this language). From these contrasts we infer cross-linguistic differences in thinking for speaking, a real-time version of the linguistic relativity (Whorfian) hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse cohesion is viewed from the perspective of a speech/gesture synthesis. Based on narrative and conversational data, we present cross-cultural evidence of cohesive elements marked by repetitive gestures that maintain continuity with respect to their location in space, the hand with which they are produced, and/or their form. The data show the joint contribution made by speech and gesture to the process of creating and maintaining discourse topics. It is claimed that an approach to discourse that focuses on events taking place at the moment of speaking, unlike approaches that assume the prior existence of planned discourse units, can account for the impact of speech and gesture on thought; for example, the execution of a gesture helps the speaker to track presupposed background information, and so provides a basis for the production of the communicatively dynamic part of an utterance. The proposed model of discourse production is a dialectic, in which gesture and speech provide interacting voices, and the relationship between the voices moves the discourse forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that on-line linguistic choices are made in a matrix of continuous discourse connections. We investigate the hypothesis that communicative dynamism (CD) is this representation of the whole in the parts. We view CD as a graded variable that can be measured only with respect to large stretches of discourse. Based on our analysis of extended narrative and conversational data, we find that CD directly correlates with the quantity of linguistic material devoted to a reference. We identify two strategies with which this is accomplished: one constructive, the other anticipatory. We find that gestures of the kind co-occurring with speech also reflect the communicative status of the utterance. Initial positions of explicitly delineated narrative units are accompanied by more gestures (both pointing and beats). A similar phenomenon appears in a highly unstructured conversation, with pointing gestures accompanying initial references to topics. We interpret these correlations of the quantity of gesture and the quantity of linguistic referring material as reflecting an underlying unity of speech and gesture. Thought itself, Vygotsky (1962) argued, is the formation of psychological predicates--elements of discontinuity from the existing context. A speaker highlights these discontinuities by adding to the quantity and multiplying the avenues of departure from the context in both speech and gesture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the integration of speech and gesture in children. Role of gesture in the analysis of language systems; Manifestation in modes of speech-gesture combination; Difference between conventional and nonconventional gestures.