Gesture - Current Issue

Questions serve to initiate and continue conversation as well as to gain information and introduce new topics. In signed languages a question can be signaled by modifying the content of an utterance or by coordinating the use of nonmanual markers (e.g., the questioning look) and manual modulation (e.g., holding the sign for an extended duration). Cross-fostered chimpanzees, who use signs of American Sign Language (ASL), have demonstrated behaviors that appear in human conversation, including question-answer exchanges. The current study describes the production of questions by signing chimpanzees in a conversational context and offers a methodology for quantifying the relationship between nonmanual markers and manual modulation involved in interrogative utterances.

One striking commonality between languages is their Zipfian distributions: A power-law distribution of word frequency. This distribution is found across languages, speech genres, and within different parts of speech. The recurrence of such distributions is thought to reflect cognitive and/or communicative pressures and to facilitate language learning. However, research on Zipfian distributions has mostly been limited to spoken languages. In this study, we ask whether Zipfian distributions are also found across signed languages, as expected if they reflect a universal property of human language. We find that sign frequencies and ranks in three sign language corpora (BSL, DGS and NGT) show a Zipfian relationship, similar to that found in spoken languages. These findings highlight the commonalities between spoken and signed languages, add to our understanding of the use of signs, and show the prevalence of Zipfian distributions across language modalities, supporting the idea that they facilitate language learning and communication.

Teachers’ use of gestures in the classroom can support the language acquisition of learners in learning a second language (Stam & Tellier, 2022). Depending on learners’ language skills, different dimensions of gestures (e.g., deictic, metaphorical) are considered to facilitate successful language comprehension. This study investigates which gestures teachers use in German as a second language (GSL) classrooms and to what extent teachers adapt their gestures to learners’ language proficiency. Teacher gestures in 10 video-recorded integration and preparation classes were analyzed. Two coders reliably identified 4143 gestures. Results show that GSL teachers predominantly used deictic gestures, metaphorical gestures, and feedback by head movements. Moreover, between-learner variability in teachers’ use of deictic and metaphorical gestures was explained by teacher-perceived German language proficiency of learners. These results suggest that teachers systematically adapt some dimensions of gestures in GSL classes, thus emphasizing the importance of studying nonverbal interactions for a better understanding of language acquisition processes.