Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess. Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in...
Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech a...
David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an imagery-language dialectic that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. In "Gesture and Thought, " the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who...
David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in b...
What is the relation between gestures and speech? In terms of symbolic forms, of course, the spontaneous and unwitting gestures we make while talking differ sharply from spoken language itself. Whereas spoken language is linear, segmented, standardized, and arbitrary, gestures are global, synthetic, idiosyncratic, and imagistic. In Hand and Mind, David McNeill presents a bold theory of the essential unity of speech and the gestures that accompany it. This long-awaited, provocative study argues that the unity of gestures and language far exceeds the surface level of speech noted by previous...
What is the relation between gestures and speech? In terms of symbolic forms, of course, the spontaneous and unwitting gestures we make while talking ...
In this volume, the author deals explicitly and literally with the speech-thought relationship. Departing boldly from contemporary linguistic and psycholinguistic thinking, the author offers us one of the truly serious efforts since Vygotsky to deal with this question. A unifying theme is the organization of action, and speech is seen as growing out of sensory-motor representations that are simultaneously part of meaning and part of action.
In this volume, the author deals explicitly and literally with the speech-thought relationship. Departing boldly from contemporary linguistic and p...