New research shows that native language affects the way people transmit information from childhood and suggests the presence of a universal system of gestural communication.
Seyda Özçaliskan, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University, has been researching the connection between language and thought for years. Her latest study, ‘What the development of gestures with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thinking’, is a continuation of previous work with adults.
For this study, Özçaliskan, in collaboration with Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago and Che Lucero of Cornell University, focused on children ages 3 to 12. The children spoke English or Turkish. They were asked to use their hands to represent specific actions, such as running into a house.
“English and Turkish were the main comparisons because they differ in the way they talk about events,” Özçaliskan, a native Turkish speaker, said in a statement.
“If you speak Turkish, if you want to describe someone running into a house, you have to break it down. You say, ‘He’s running and then he enters the house,'” he said. “But if it’s in English, they’ll just say ‘he ran towards the house,’ all in one compact sentence. As such, it’s easier to express run (form of movement) and enter (path of movement) together in a single English expression that in Turkish.
“We wanted to find out whether or not gestures follow these differences and how early children learn these patterns.”
The researchers asked the children to describe the same action first while speaking (speech and co-speech gesture) and then without speaking, just with their hands (known as a silent gesture).
They found that when children spoke and gestured at the same time, their gestures followed the conventions of their language, with clear differences between the gestures of Turkish and English speakers. However, when the children used gestures without speaking, their gestures were remarkably similar.
“It is easier to express run and enter in a single gesture compared to speech, especially for Turkish speakers who have to express run and enter in two separate sentences in their speech,” Özçaliskan said. “So when you’re not speaking, the gesture doesn’t have to follow the separation of manner and path, and you can easily put them together.”
The study also found that these patterns appear at a very young age. Children’s joint gestures begin to follow the patterns of their spoken language between 3 and 4 years of age.
Özçaliskan, in collaboration with Goldin-Meadow, has also studied blind and sighted adults. Those participants were also English and Turkish speakers. Using the same methods as their last study, the researchers were surprised to find the same differences in co-speech gestures and similarities in silent gestures. This was despite the fact that the blind participants were blind from birth, meaning they had never seen anyone gesturing before.
So far, Özçaliskan said, all studies have shown very similar results. In fact, many of the gestures used by the participants resemble what are known as “home sign systems,” which are informal sign language systems created spontaneously by deaf children, who have not been exposed to sign language. conventional by their hearing parents.
“What we see, in fact, are some of these types of basic structures that we see, for example, in early sign languages,” Özçaliskan said.
This pattern suggests that there may be a universal gesture system that allows us to communicate with each other regardless of language, hearing ability, or sight.
Özçaliskan said the next step of this research is to study Turkish and English-speaking blind children to see if the same patterns occur.
2023-12-17 10:06:32
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