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Published online 26 November 1998 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news981126-2
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Why do people gesture when they speak?
Why do all of us, regardless of our race, culture or language, wave our hands about when we speak? Why is it, for example, that when we are telling someone about pouring liquid, for example, we actually hold up a hand crooked into a ‘C’ shape and rock it back and forth a bit? Are we just following some sort of cultural convention and copying what, as children we saw others do to communicate similar concepts? Are we, for the benefit of the listener, visually illustrating the point that we are trying to get across verbally? Or does waving our hands about help us to think?
Frankly, no-one really knows. So to begin to answer some of these questions Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana have carried out an intriguing series of observational experiments on congenitally blind children and adolescents, that they now report in Nature.
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