Gesture and Thought
by David McNeill
First published 2005
Psychologist and psycholinguist David McNeill argues that
gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking, gestures being
a key ingredient in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech
and thought. Gestures are the "imagery" and also the components of
"language," rather than mere consequences. The smallest unit of this
dialectic is the "growth point," a snapshot of an utterance at its
beginning psychological stage. McNeill studied videos of stimulus stories being
retold "together with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by
speakers of different languages, ages and abilities. He 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.