Hearing Gesture: How our Hands Help us Think

  • Susan Goldin-Meadow
Belknap Press: 2003. 304 pp. $29.95, £19.95, €27.70 0674010728 | ISBN: 0-674-01072-8
Handy hints: gestures provide information that can make it easier to understand speech — or even replace it entirely. Credit: BOB ROWAN/PROGRESSIVE IMAGE/CORBIS

Over the past two decades, researchers have produced overwhelming evidence that the gestures we use as we speak are integrally connected to both our speech and our thought processes. Susan Goldin-Meadow has been at the forefront of this new scientific direction. In Hearing Gesture, she provides a synthesis of her decades of work on gesture studies. It is a welcome scholarly arrival for gesture researchers, and should be important news to social and cognitive scientists, who so far have paid little attention to the gestures that accompany speech.

Hearing Gesture is an engaging (even suspenseful) read and, with its clear and informal style, should be largely accessible to non-experts. It centres around four primary questions. First, is gesture really a window on thought? If it is, do most people (as opposed to just researchers) read gesture? Does gesture also help the speaker's own cognitive processes — and if so, how? And finally, what are the differences between the gestures that accompany speech and visual gestures used on their own? Goldin-Meadow examines these questions — her answer to the first three is ‘yes’, by the way — in the lab and in everyday settings such as the classroom. In so doing, she looks at the communication of infants, children and adults, including sighted and blind, deaf and hearing, and normal and cognitively impaired subjects.

Goldin-Meadow has pioneered ways of studying gesture, one of her signature methods being the comparison of ‘matched’ gestures, which overlap in meaning with the accompanying speech, and ‘mismatched’ gestures, which either complement or conflict with the linguistic meaning. With Breckie Church she observed children explaining their answers to piagetian conservation tasks (conservation of mass, number or volume when physical appearance is altered). Some children produce mismatched gesture–speech pairings. For example, they say that a tall, thin container has a large volume “because it's taller”, but simultaneously make a gesture indicating width; this shows awareness that the container's width, as well as its height, is relevant to the quantity of water it holds. These children, it turns out, are the ones who are most ready to learn about conservation, either by instruction or experimentation (Cognition 23, 43–71; 1987).

The contrast between matches and mismatches turns out to be a remarkable tool. Goldin-Meadow's later studies show that matched gestures lower the cognitive load on the speaker and speed the listener's comprehension, whereas mismatched gestures raise the load on both sides of communication, which makes sense because they bring in another cognitive model besides that presented in speech. However, Goldin-Meadow argues that mismatches are advantageous in other ways. Because hearers do ‘read’ gestures and process the information expressed (as also shown in earlier work by David McNeill and Adam Kendon), mismatched gestures not only allow speakers to express models that are inaccessible to speech but also give listeners access to those models, with the added advantage of providing potential feedback to speakers.

The use of the term ‘mismatch’ presents difficulties from time to time — it is regrettably not always clear which kind (complementary or conflicting) is most relevant in a given study. The author remarks that gestures rarely correspond precisely with words in meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this should mean that complementary mismatches, like matches but not like conflicting mismatches, show overlap between gestural and linguistic meaning — the boundary between matches and mismatches is perhaps presented as more tidy than it really is. However, there is careful differentiation in some crucial cases, such as the examination of cognitive load, and Goldin-Meadow comments that apparently conflicting mismatches often reflect different aspects of a potentially unified larger cognitive framework.

Another strand of Goldin-Meadow's work has been the examination of purely gestural communication, including that of deaf children with hearing parents. She compares their individual gestural systems with conventional signed languages and with hearing gesture that has taken over the communicative load. This provides rich evidence from several domains for McNeill's claims that gesture becomes ‘language-like’ when it takes on the primary informational load of communication. Gesture becomes conventionalized, segmented and even ‘grammaticized’ — the gestural systems of orally raised deaf children have a basic grammatical structure.

I have touched on only a few of Goldin-Meadow's projects and methodologies. Readers will be impressed by her extraordinary combination of thoughtful insight, experimental ingenuity and immense persistence and dedication to the search for knowledge. She and her co-workers are currently researching such applied issues as the need to interpret children's gestures alongside speech in legal and psychiatric questioning, and also the degree to which adult questioners' gestures influence children's output.

Fully recognizing the vast unknown areas awaiting gesture researchers' attention, Goldin-Meadow presents multiple viewpoints where there is disagreement, in the examination of signed language gesture, for example, or the connection between gesture and lexical access. And she continues to push the boundaries of her field, raising new questions alongside the ones she answers.

Hearing Gesture stands beside McNeill's Hand and Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Language and Gesture (Cambridge University Press, 2000) as a milestone in the study of gesture's relationship with language and thought. It may help to reshape the basic premises and methods of psychologists, linguists and other social scientists.