Gesture - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2014

With the exception of Plains Indian Sign Language and Pacific Northwest sawmill sign languages, highly developed alternate sign languages (sign languages typically employed by and for the hearing) share not only common structural linguistic features, but their use is also characterized by convergent ideological commitments concerning communicative medium and linguistic modality. Though both modalities encode comparable denotational content, speaker-signers tend to understand manual-visual sign as a pragmatically appropriate substitute for oral-aural speech. This paper suggests that two understudied clusters of alternate sign languages, Armenian and Cape York Peninsula sign languages, offer a general model for the development of alternate sign languages, one in which the gesture-to-sign continuum is dialectically linked to hypertrophied forms of interactional avoidance up-to-and-including complete silence in the co-presence of affinal relations. These cases illustrate that the pragmatic appropriateness of sign over speech relies upon local semiotic ideologies which tend to conceptualize the manual-visual linguistic modality on analogy to the gestural communication employed in interactional avoidance, and thus as not counting as true language.

Downward stroke gestures which are produced in conjunction with the solution of speaking trouble, such as a word search, during English language discussions among Japanese university students, are described and labeled solution strokes. Similar gestures that involve striking something are labeled solution strikes. These gestures can be understood as the gestural component of the utterance which solves the trouble. They index the subjective experience of the trouble and its solution and possibly a positive affective stance toward the solution. Solution strokes are argued to be the gestural component of a solution and it is shown that understanding the meaning of a solution stroke requires attending to how it is situated in the local context.

Scholars have often reasoned that vocalizations are extremely limited in their potential for iconic expression, especially in comparison to manual gestures (e.g., Armstrong & Wilcox, 2007; Tomasello, 2008). As evidence for an alternative view, we first review the growing body of research related to iconicity in vocalizations, including experimental work on sound symbolism, cross-linguistic studies documenting iconicity in the grammars and lexicons of languages, and experimental studies that examine iconicity in the production of speech and vocalizations. We then report an experiment in which participants created vocalizations to communicate 60 different meanings, including 30 antonymic pairs. The vocalizations were measured along several acoustic properties, and these properties were compared between antonyms. Participants were highly consistent in the kinds of sounds they produced for the majority of meanings, supporting the hypothesis that vocalization has considerable potential for iconicity. In light of these findings, we present a comparison between vocalization and manual gesture, and examine the detailed ways in which each modality can function in the iconic expression of particular kinds of meanings. We further discuss the role of iconic vocalizations and gesture in the evolution of language since our divergence from the great apes. In conclusion, we suggest that human communication is best understood as an ensemble of kinesis and vocalization, not just speech, in which expression in both modalities spans the range from arbitrary to iconic.

This paper is about re-thinking gesture in order to reckon with its material and haptic nature, especially in the current multitouch technology environment. This re-thinking of gesture returns to the principle of indexicality found in Peirce’s material semiotics, and develops this principle through the work of Gilles Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze around hand-eye relationships. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Streek, we propose and discuss the notion of the tangible gesture, in the context of mathematical explorations of young children with a multitouch iPad environment designed to promote counting on and with the fingers.

Co-speech gestures in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are poorly understood. Historically, all gestures were thought to be reduced in this social-communicative disorder; however, reduced gestures have not been consistently demonstrated in the empirical literature. Just as protodeclarative pointing is reduced in young children with ASD, while protoimperative pointing is not, the varied functions of co-speech gesture may explain these mixed findings. Verbally fluent adolescents with ASD (n = 18) and controls (n = 18) completed a narrative task and a standardized executive function task. Gestures on the narrative task, which serve a wide range of social and cognitive functions, were reduced in ASD. Gestures on the executive function task, which serve primarily cognitive functions, were increased in ASD. Gesture function may be the best predictor of the presence or absence of gesture in ASD. Despite reduced social-communicative gestures, individuals with ASD may benefit from gesture’s internal, cognitive functions.