Ever wondered why some people seem to have an aversion to gesturing while speaking? Or did you know that even in the absence of sight, human beings instinctively use gestures to communicate?

Susan Goldin-Meadow is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago and also the author of the books Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts, The Resilience of Language, and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think.

Susan and Greg take a deep dive into the integral role of gestures in language acquisition, especially during early childhood. They also discuss the striking similarity of key gestures across various cultures, indicating a shared linguistic heritage, the fascinating evolution of various sign languages, and the unique ways they convey information distinctly from spoken language.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

On integrating gesture with speech

34:21: What gesture is really good at is integrating with speech. It needs to be integrated with speech. It's one of the reasons co-speech gesture is useless for deaf kids because they can't hear the speech, and then they see all of these things that we do, and they think, and so what they come up with is quite different from co-speech gestures. So, co-speech gesture is co-speech gesture and needs to be thought about along with speech. So, taking away speech isn't going to do it. If in fact, you tell people, "Okay, shut up, don't say a word," but gesture to describe this, your gesture will look different from the way it looks when it accompanies speech.

Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language

26:18: You can do whatever you want in sign language, and it works. It's a language. Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language or spoken language.

Transmission is important for language to take-off

12:40: Deaf individuals used to be pretty isolated in hearing homes. But at one point, they created a Deaf education system, and they brought a bunch of homesigners, essentially, together, and they interacted with one another. So, at that point, they started to develop lexical items that they shared, things like that. But the language took off when new little deaf kids came into the community and learned the system from these older ones. So, there's some evidence that real transmission helps the language grow. You may need to share it and communicate. But transmission is essential in order for the language to take off.

Sign language is more than just Hand-in-Mouth

31:00: Signers gesture, but their sign language is categorical, just like spoken language, and their gesture is more imagistic. So, sign language sign-gesture mismatches work in the same way that speech-gesture mismatches work: to predict. Learning it can't be about two modalities because the signers are using one modality, just hands, to represent this stuff—and that turns out to be true. So it feels like it's not just hand-in-mouth. Hand-in-mouth may help. It may do some work for us, but there's something more. It really is the way gesture represents information and language represents information co-occurring together.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile at the University of Chicago
The Goldin-Meadow Laboratory
National Academy of Sciences Profile
Susan Goldin-Meadow on LinkedIn
Susan Goldin-Meadow on TEDxUChicago

Her Work:

351. The Transformative Power of Gestures feat. Susan Goldin-Meadow

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

351. The Transformative Power of Gestures feat. Susan Goldin-Meadow