Speech Includes Gesture

Some gestures stay in the mind as sharply as the most memorable phrase.

Simone Pika has published a useful review of ape gestures in the First Language journal, “Gestures of apes and pre-linguistic human children: Similar or different?” (abstract here). I don’t suppose it will bowl anyone over with its finding that while both apes and children can make imperative gestures (e.g., give me food) human children, but not apes, also make “gestures for declarative purposes to direct the attention of others to some third entity, simply for the sake of sharing interest in it or commenting on it” [p. 131]. But when all the different sorts of ape gestures are drawn together it is quite evident that the really peculiar aspect of speech is the presence of what this blog calls the speech triangle, and what Pika calls triadic form. That is, humans are peculiar in having a speaker, a listener, and an outside topic.

Dyadic gestures—actions used to attract attention to the actor—are common enough among apes, but informative triads among apes in the wild are almost unknown. (The one exception: a free bonobo once was observed probably pointing out human observers hiding in the bushes.) Pika says a little ambiguously, “It is therefore quite puzzling why only human beings comment on outside entities simply to share experiences.” I would put it a little differently. It’s quite puzzling how we came to comment on outside entities when no other animal seems to share the need. Once we can give a solid explanation for that puzzle, we will have come a long way in understanding why humans are different.

Pika proposes that possibly the “propensity [to comment on outside entities] derived from the need to create a new medium for social bonding triggered by an increase of group size, superseding grooming as a servicing tool for social relationships.” [131] That’s Robin Dunbar’s old thesis, and I am surprised to see it turn up here because the objection has had plenty of time to get around. Babbling and singing together provide emotional links without having to do all the rebuilding of the brain and sociology that meaningful speech requires. So, if all speech arose to do was fill in for grooming, why do we speak meaningfully?

More useful is the way Pika’s article forces attention on the difference between ape and human gestures while providing a link between the two. Here is the critical difference:

Many human gestures are … used to direct the attention and mental states of others to outside entities… Apes also gesture… but use these communicative means mainly as effective procedures in dyadic interactions to request action from others. [pp 131-132]

Because of the thoroughness of the Pika’s review I feel confident in taking the dyadic/triadic distinction as settled. A human peculiarity is our interest in and attention to neutral topics that have nothing to do with the brute facts of survival. (“Brute facts” is a handy term I heard Chris Knight use at the Evolang conference.)

Pika goes on:

Many of these [ape] gestures are used intentionally and are clearly learned. Thus, this review provides further support for the hypothesis that the gestural modality of our closest living relatives might have been the crucial modality of our closest living relatives  within which the evolutionary precursors of symbolic communication evolved. [p. 132]

I have long been skeptical of the idea that sign language preceded speech, chiefly on the grounds that it replaces one hard problem (the origins of speech) with another (the origins of sign language); however, if we take gesture more generally Pika along with Susan Goldin-Meadow at Evolang (See: Gesture Adds More than Structure) have persuaded me that directive and illustrative gestures have been with us all along and that the idea of speech as vocalization without gesture is naïve. Gesture is another set of cues that are missing from written language.

Sound and gesture together, by the way, are older than speech. In Pika’s accounts—although she does not dwell on this point—the apes are routinely making noises while they gesture. The sounds in these cases seem to be offered as attention getters, the equivalent of saying, “Ahem,” and holding out one’s hand to a person eating from a bag of M&Ms.

One can imagine this kind of progression:

1. An ape gesturing imperatively while attracting attention vocally. (Routine dyadic communicative interaction)
2. Australopithecus/Homo attracting attention vocally while pointing to an outside matter of interest. (Triadic interaction)
3. Homo adding meaning to vocal signal while gesturing about an outside matter of interest. (Full speech triangle)

Both of these steps involve important breaks. The second step requires some sort of profound sociological shift, and the third follows only from a shift in the nature of vocalizations. None the less, it looks possible (maybe even likely) that the first pilot of attention toward a neutral topic was gestural pointing rather than a spoken word.

Comments

[JanetK]

It is so nice to get to this point!
A narrative of the origin of language that does not give an explanation for the interlocked relationship between gesture and voice would seem incomplete and not particularly convincing.
I see various roles for gesture in present day speech:
• The equivalent of emoticons, clues to the emotional state of the speaker, needed to interpret the meaning of utterances. Example: palm up and palm down signal.
• Gestures to attract attention to something, components of our dyatic and triatic situations.
• The equivalent of words. Those gestures that have a silent space inserted into the speech flow while they are made.
• The equivalent of illustrations. Those gestures that accompany speech (not as words) but as additional information in the form of a mine or picture.
• The equivalent of a baton. The use of the hands to mark the rhythm of speech so that the speaker and listener are synchronized. This helps the listener follow what is being said.
We hardly realize how much we use and rely on gestures. People gesture when they are on the phone! Some people can barely talk if their hands are not free and will put down a load in order to say some simple thing so they can use their hands! People, especially children, flail about with their hands when they can’t find the words to express something. And on and on.

[watercat]

This is great! In both language acquisition and language creation (a la Nicaraua), the first pilot of attention is always pointing. Then comes the complementary one-word stage where the child might say 'ball' while pointing to a ball—both the gesture and the ball refer to the same thing. After this comes the supplementary one-word stage where the sound and the gesture carry different information—saying 'more' while pointing at food. These seem similar to your steps 2 & 3. When the environment doesn't include speech, both these stages are missing, so we go right to the two-word stage—point followed by signed word. When the kid is exposed to a signed language it takes some pretty fancy analysis to tell pointing from saying 'that', and if her environment includes both spoken and signed language, it can be impossible to tell co-speech gestures from a bilingual utterance.
In my lectures I illustrate by giving a command to one person while making eye contact with someone else—resulting in a compete breakdown of communication. One problem in English grammar is that “all sentences must have a subject”--so where does it go in the imperative? Giving the a command in ASL, the eyegaze is interpreted as a morpheme indicating the subject, but not so in English, even though both languages do exactly the same thing! Another example is the sentence “This is not this”. Although arguably grammatical, no one accepts it as making any sense—until they see the video showing the pointing gestures that no one in their right mind would say it without. Such sentences are common, and the points are pronouns when conversing in ASL, but if conversing in English they are...nothing(?).

[JoseAngel]

Quite illuminating. I would like to point out (ahem) that the ability to point outside the situation of dyadic interaction in a "triangular" way, peculiar to humans, has to do with the peculiar specular quality of dyadic communication. That is, if I am interactant A, I can only point out C to interactant B once I can take for granted that B can see what I can see, that is, that B is a subject like myself and constructs a perceptual world much like mine but "mirrored" (in the sense that he recognizes me in the same way). Some philosophical reflections about mutuality, the Other, and reciprocal recognition would seem to stretch their roots back to some neurological mechanism which allows this specularity (and I'm thinking of mirror neurons). In a nutshell: the third in question can only appear in a process of interaction which is mutually reflexive (Ok that sounds redundant, but then reflexivity leads you into infinite regress, unless you bring in some third element into the situation, that is).
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BLOGGER: There is much discussion about apes and a "theory of mind." We know that chimps sometimes do take into account whether another is looking at something or not. For example, a subordinate chimpanzee will not take food visible to a dominant, but will take food that is hidden from the dominant's view. Does this mean that chimpanzees recognize the mental state of seeing in others? Philosophers disagree.

[Chris Crawford]

Dogs can have their attention directed both by gesture and by gaze. This is understandable because they are pack hunters. I wonder, is this true in general? Do all pack hunters have directable attention?
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BLOGGER: Joint attention and gaze direction are not the same thing and one does not imply the other. Apes will direct their attention to where a fellow ape is looking, but nothing is shared mutually learned by the action. That said, dogs are a special and interesting case, not because they are pack hunters (most are not) but because they have adapted so well to human society. Pack hunting origins may have given them a spur in the right direction, but they still had to discover human ways. I have seen African wild dogs hunt and lions too. Social hunters direct their attention in the same way, but I have never seen one point or gesture to another indicating, say, over there, zebra.

[watercat]

Another point is the role of emotion. Co-speech gesture qualifies as a typical sociolinguistic variable, varying as a function of speech style. Exactly as with William Labov's R-deletion, the more emotional the speaker the more gestures occur. More formal speech styles, where speakers suppress their emotions, are accompanied by little or no unconscious gestures. It seems reasonable that learning to suppress our limbic responses goes along with developing language?

[Brent]

What happened the boy's coat in the picture at the top? It's terribly ragged.