Researchers transcribed a 6-year-old's gesture and speech while she retold a cartoon to her father and found that her words narrated in third person while her body simultaneously acted in first person, a split that challenges the view of gesture as redundant to speech.

201 points by Cad_Lin 15 hours ago on reddit | 11 comments

I’m not sure what a gesturing in 1st or 3rd person means.

lightstormriverblood | 11 hours ago

I assume it refers to the child acting out what the characters are doing. Could very well be wrong!

Gesturing is in 1st person. Aka they reenact what they saw the character do, but at the same time they say "Character did..." - which is third person.

Honestly, I'm not sure how you could even act in "third person" other than pointing at someone who does something.

OGLikeablefellow | 5 hours ago

Puppets

: bstabens | 5 hours ago
Yeah, technically right, but not really considered "gesturing". ;)

phenomenomnom | 10 hours ago

Unironically, this is super relevant to my interests as an actor and director. I'm going to read it as soon as I get to a desktop.

Was the study done by researchers at the Brazilian university? (Or is it just being reposted by them? The English section is making me wonder which direction it was translated in)

Don_Ford | 7 hours ago

Who TF is out here saying gesturing is redundant to speech?

SparklePants-5000 | 2 hours ago

The linguists and psychologists who actually study it. Gestures during speech are very commonly used in ways that convey redundant information with what is being uttered. For example, if I’m describing something as small, I may pinch my fingers together to indicate smallness. If I’m describing something large, I may hold my arms apart to convey its largeness. These gestures are redundant with what is actually being spoken in that they convey the same information.

Importantly, this redundancy is not viewed as a negative. Rather, it’s thought to aid communication, making comprehension easier.

: wibbly-water | an hour ago
Specifically gestures are paralinguistic. This means that they can contain some of the aspects of language, but do not compose "words" or "grammar", nor do specific gestures have specific ties to specific words in speech.

This is different from sign languages where signs do have specific semantic meaning (thus are "words") and have grammar. But in sign languages - any sounds made are now paralinguistic.

There are people who try to sign and speak, sometimes called SimCom, but usually one is dominant and the other becomes redundant. Usually that is speech that becomes dominant, and the signs begin to follow the speech word order with semantic and grammatical gaps.

The point is you can speak without gestures and the meaning remains the same.
: Aggressive_Sky8492 | 54 minutes ago
Those examples aren’t redundant though. “Small” is very vague. Pinching your fingers together or otherwise gesturing about the size of something usually means you’re showing the actual size of the thing, which is much more specific than a generic descriptor like “small” or “large”

wibbly-water | an hour ago

I don't find this paper terribly convincing as a challenge to the notion of gesture redundancy.

Yes of course the gestures are used, but even in the examples provided they are supplementary rather than directly additive or replacing of what could've been speech:

>In line 14, the speech appears in the third person ("then Daddy made a bigger one:") in conjunction with the iconic gesture (also evoking action and entities)[1]. The gesture that appears (with the body tilted forward and downward, pushing, with the hands, the imaginary snowball, circling in a circle: ICONIC PANTOMIME), occurs in the first person, and in this case, in the gesture-speech relationship, the gesture is what performs the function of supplementation in relation to speech, by indicating the way in which this snowball has become larger (rolling it on the ground in circles).

So here "then Daddy makes a bigger one" would be enough for the idea to be conveyed, the gesture supplements the speech. The child is still primarily speaking, with gestures for flourish.

Only rarely, as in maybe here:

>The grunts of effort establish a relationship of supplementation with the gestures, because from the speech we have the addition that the snowball is heavy, which explains why it was not raised even after three attempts by the I.F./penguin.

Does the child seem to gesture in-stead of speak.

And none of this establishes any sort of structure to the gestures. They seem to be pure pantomime, with no established vocabulary or grammar of their own. It is implied that perhaps "penguin"/"Pingu" gets a singular lexicalised gesture - but it isn't really demonstrated if that exists outside of this specific interaction.

I mentioned in another comment about sign languages. This is unlike sign languages because sign languages do have established vocabularies and grammars.

For the most part - the gesture could be removed and the meaning of the speech would be roughly the same. The same way you can remove tone of voice and the meaning of speech remains roughly the same. However if removed the words and just had gesture / tone of voice, the message would be heavily altered and harder to recover. Yes gesture does add something, but that thing supplements the speech and is largely redundant.