Post by Clouseau on Nov 21, 2006 16:15:54 GMT
www.newscientist.com/article/dn10608-gestures-say-so-much-whatever-your-language.html
Gestures say so much, whatever your language
12:19 20 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Matt Kaplan
Language lives as much in our gestures as in our words, a new study shows.
Certain languages are richer in gesture, and such unspoken communication is so strong that bilingual individuals often use the fluent gestures from one language, even when speaking the words of another.
Simone Pika at the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues took a bilingual group who spoke gesture-rich languages like French and Spanish as their mother tongue, and English – a gesture-poor language – as their second language. As a control, the team also gathered a group of English-only speakers.
Each person was given a Pink Panther cartoon to describe in each of the languages they spoke. The results were clear: the bilingual individuals gestured more frequently when discussing the cartoon, even when speaking in English, Pika says.
Gesture vocabulary
More surprising was the discovery, with another group, that bilingual people with English as their mother tongue and French or Spanish as their second language also gestured far more frequently in English than English monolinguals did.
This suggests that once an enhanced gesture "vocabulary" is learned, it becomes an important aspect of communication, used alongside all languages known by the speaker.
“Language acquisition is an embodied experience and consists of visual and auditory parts,” Pika explains.
The team is now studying bilinguals with two gesture-poor languages – such as English and Japanese – to see whether simply becoming bilingual increases gesture rates.
12:19 20 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Matt Kaplan
Language lives as much in our gestures as in our words, a new study shows.
Certain languages are richer in gesture, and such unspoken communication is so strong that bilingual individuals often use the fluent gestures from one language, even when speaking the words of another.
Simone Pika at the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues took a bilingual group who spoke gesture-rich languages like French and Spanish as their mother tongue, and English – a gesture-poor language – as their second language. As a control, the team also gathered a group of English-only speakers.
Each person was given a Pink Panther cartoon to describe in each of the languages they spoke. The results were clear: the bilingual individuals gestured more frequently when discussing the cartoon, even when speaking in English, Pika says.
Gesture vocabulary
More surprising was the discovery, with another group, that bilingual people with English as their mother tongue and French or Spanish as their second language also gestured far more frequently in English than English monolinguals did.
This suggests that once an enhanced gesture "vocabulary" is learned, it becomes an important aspect of communication, used alongside all languages known by the speaker.
“Language acquisition is an embodied experience and consists of visual and auditory parts,” Pika explains.
The team is now studying bilinguals with two gesture-poor languages – such as English and Japanese – to see whether simply becoming bilingual increases gesture rates.