Gesture and language, gesture as language, language as gesture: Comments on Loehr and Fais et al.

Abstract

1.� Gestureandlanguage As Loehr notes in his paper in this issue (Loehr 2012), there has been a growing interest among gesture researchers and linguists in relationship between ges- ture and language. Loehr expands upon work in this area by examining interaction between intonation and gesture, noting temporal, structural, and prag- matic synchronies. Loehr reports a number of intriguing findings. First, his research shows that in- tonational and gestural events occur near each other, with tones clustering tightly around gestures. He also notes a somewhat looser correlation between gestural phrases and intermediate phrases. The most interesting finding, however, is that gestural and intonational meanings correlate. His data reveal a number of prag- matic functions that are performed by intonation and gesture in tight synchrony. Based on these findings, and primarily temporal alignment of gesture phrases with intermediate phrases, Loehr offers a possible explanation for this wide- spread synchrony between intonation and gesture. It reflects, he suggests, the size of cognitive which can be expressed through a single surge of bodily and vocal action. That is, both intermediate intonational phrases and gesture phrases act to package unfolding cognitive content, and this, Loehr suggests, provides further support for hypothesis that gesture shares a common origin with speech. Fais et al. (2012) report on a series of experiments designed to examine abil- ity of infants to associate novel, minimal pair word-forms with novel objects. They also introduce variable of whether presence of a human interactor facili- tates this word-object association. In previous studies, experimental method by which this might have been studied was standard looking time measures. One sig- nificant aspect of Fais et al.'s work - both in terms of specific language acquisi- tion questions addressed but also for a large view of nature of language and gesture - is use of an optical flow algorithm permitting sophisticated analysis of kinematics of infant motion during these tasks. The results show that infants in their study benefitted from presence of a live experimenter in demonstrating success in associating novel, minimal pair