Sub sections:
What is gesture?
What is gesture, and is everyone ‘hardwired’ to do it?
School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
Tuesday 10th June
12 noon–1pm
Seminar Room 2 (Rm 31), Psychology Building SO6
To most of us, gesture seems a clearly different mode of communication from speech, contrasting not only in its physical channel but also in its structure and in the very principles by which a form – such as a point, or a depictive gesture – relate to meaning. Comparisons of spoken with natural signed communication systems nevertheless strongly suggest that our ‘gesture’ is not an innate communicative package, crafted by evolutionary pressures to accompany and support an equally inevitable communicative package ‘speech’, but a surprisingly contingent developmental product of human communication when it happens to have access to both oral/aural and manual channels. Are there any better candidates, then, for the role of the innately-given raw material of speaker-hearers’ gesture and what does it mean if the same raw materials can be seen to enter into speech?