David McNeill b. 1933
David McNeill is a psychologist, psycholinguist and writer,
specialising in the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that
accompany discourse. McNeill studied videos of stimulus stories being retold
"together with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by speakers
of different languages, ages and abilities. McNeill found that body gestures,
rather than being unrelated to spoken content, worked together with words to
convey true meaning. Gestures can replace speech but should therefore be
typically considered jointly as integral components of communication,
emphasising and supporting each other. He hypothesised that the brain circuits
used in language could not have evolved without gestures, and that there
remains a thought-language-hand link, with many of our hand movements being
spontaneous accompaniments to informal speech. His conclusions included that
speech and gesture may present different pictures but jointly give clearer
insight; that gestures can help us discover what’s highlighted (relevant and
not); gestures can present an image of the invisible or abstract; and that they
can be symbolic. McNeill also produced a Gesture-Space Diagram.
Read Gesture and Thought (2005) Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
