Gestures: Original Form Of Communication

Irina Shlionskaya

It is traditionally believed that language as a means of communication arose from sounds: at first, people mumbled and grumbled indistinctly, trying to express their emotions or convey information, then gradually separate syllables and words denoting certain concepts began to be isolated from this stream.

However, researchers from the University of Western Australia have a different opinion: our distant ancestors at the initial stage did not use sounds for communication, but gestures!

Everyone gesticulates! Almost all of us, often on an unconscious level, tend to accompany our speech with gestures. And often, even among representatives of different cultures, certain gestures mean the same thing. And for some groups of people, manual symbolism is the only form of communication.

"People of all cultures gesticulate when they speak, the blind gesticulate, and hearing adults and children can successfully use gestures as their only means of communication," experts say.

And the blind "say." To test their guess, the scientists conducted two experiments. The first of them was attended by 30 residents of Australia and 30 residents of the Republic of Vanuatu - a Pacific state in Melanesia. Both groups spoke different languages.

Volunteers were asked to play a game resembling charades. In the first round, one of the players was told to represent a certain word using gestures, and the rest had to guess it. In the second round, the "leader" had to describe the word through inarticulate speech.

It turned out that gestures conveyed the meaning of words much more effectively. And the gestures that members of both teams used to describe the same words were often similar.

The second experiment was similar to the first, but the subjects with visual impairments took part in it. And again the result was the same, although here the volunteers did not have the opportunity to use visual aids.

As you know, deaf and dumb people actively use sign language when communicating with each other. But even a deaf-blind-mute person can learn to "speak" using tactile techniques.

Probably, speech arose as an auxiliary communicative resource, since it allowed expressing thoughts and emotions in a more diverse range. But, since languages were formed more separately, subsequently, representatives of different cultures and civilisations ceased to understand each other if they stopped using gestures. Perhaps this is exactly what the myths about the construction of the Tower of Babel tell about.

"The universality of gestures means that they are ideally suited for initial human communication between modern humans and therefore support the hypothesis that gestures are the main modality for the creation of language," the study authors wrote in their paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal. 

It is possible that over time, gesticulation will become one of the main means of communication between people and groups of different languages. And the latest technologies will actively help us in this, experts say.

-- Pravda.ru