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Christine Kenneally |
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123 If you have human language – you have gestures 124 Gestures play a large role in primate communication, Mike Tomasello explained, and as is the case with humans, these gestures are learned, flexible, and under voluntary control. Most primates, humans included, gesture communicatively with their right hands, suggesting that the dominance of one side of the brain for vocal and gestural communication could be as old as 30 million years. Tomasello and his group divide ape gestures into two types: attention getters and intention movements. Attention getters do just what they say - they call attention to the ape making the gesture. Intention movements are the beginning of an actual movement, like a raised fist to indicate a threat in humans. 126 Only 10 years ago researchers were unanimous in their agreement that pointing was unique to humans. Even now many stand by that claim. In fact, apes and many species of monkeys that are much more distantly related to humans do point as well, though they typically do so with their whole hand. 127 Human children learn to point at a very young age. Tomasello and his colleagues have videotaped many instances of children spontaneously pointing in a helpful manner. Tomasello first started to consider how much this kind of shared, co-operative attention mattered. The answer, he believes, is that humans are particularly co-operative in the way they communicate. Reciprocation is fundamental to the interactions of our species. Offering is not instinctive for humans, but is taught by parents to children, who learn it very easily. And crucially, we offer not only food and other objects but information and experiences as well. Children want you to look at what they are looking at and do emote in response. In many theories of evolution, human altruism is treated as an anomaly. But Tomasello thinks it is an evolutionary strategy that has served as incredibly well. Boe: altruism – reciprocation – sharing – food sharing (australopithecines) – mood sharing – group thinking – communication – Peter Fuchs Psyche 129 Tomasello and his colleagues‘ gesture work demonstrates both the continuum that connects human and ape communication and significant differences between them. In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate... What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it is not shared. Chimpanzees took a different path. In their communication, there is never just plain showing, where the goal is simply to share attention. While they do share and collaborate and understand different kinds of intentions, they do not have comunicative intentions. We do, said Tomasello, and it is in this shared space that the symbolic communication of language lies. Language, wrote Sue Savage-Rumbaugh,“coordinates behaviours between individuals by a complex process of exchanging behaviours that are punctuated by speech. Boe: turn taking – coordinating behaviour (Maturana) At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work. Symbols like words, said Tomasello, are devices that coordinate attention, just as pointing does. They presuppose a general give and take that chimpanzees don't seem to have. At our current level of understanding, asking why apes do not have language may not be at most productive question, and one that can currently lead us to much more interesting lines of empirical research, is asking why apes do not even point. Whether you're human or another kind of ape, one of the ways that gesture becomes ritualised and communicative is in being passed on by learning. As humans, we observe the gesture, and then we reproduce it by imitation. Imitation is crucial to the learning process. 131 The combination of gestural communication and imitation can be as powerful as vocal comunication. In human hunter gatherer groups the transmission of knowledge about the environment and how to survive in it is achieved by observation and experimentation and rather than by verbal explanation. 132 For a long time gesture was more or less ignored in linguistics. Researchers considered it paralinguistic, meaning that it is merely a supplementary to language, perhaps useful in terms of emphasis but ultimately a secondary and unimportant phenomenon. People assumed that gesture was only for the benefit of the listener and justified removing it from serious consideration for the simple reason that it could be removed. It is possible, after all, to hear and understand someone even if you don't look at him. In the same way, structure in language has been treated as separate from meaning because you can go a long way analysing both of them without reference to the other. Internation has been largely ignored within Chomskyan linguistics. 133 Today, like the study of language evolution itself, the field of gesture studies is undergoing a small revolution. More and more people are engaging in experimental studies of gesture, and re-searchers are discovering how complicated and interesting it can be. This miniboom is part of a general trend to reconsider what used to be called the epiphenomena of language. Researchers have shown that speech and gesture, as well as gesture and thought, interact as language is being learned and even after it has been fully acquired. 134 Develpmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time. 137 Complicated dependencies and interactions demonstrate that speech and gesture are part of the same system. Moreover, this system, made up of the two semi-independent subsystems of speech and gesture, is also closely connected to the systems of thought. Perhaps we should designate another word entirely for intentional communication that includes gesture and speech. Whatever it should be, re-searchers have demonstrated that this communication is fundamentally embodied. The most important effect of this research is that it makes it impossible to engage with the evolution of modern language without also considering the evolution of human gesture. Precisely how gesture and speech may have interacted since we split from common ancestors with chimpanzees is still debated. Gesture may have preceded speech by a significant margin, arising two million years ago when the brains of our ancestors underwent a dramatic burst in size. The transition to independence speech from this gesture language would have occurred gradually as a result of its many benefits, such as communication over long distances and the ability to use hands for other tasks, before the final shift to autonomous spoken language. |
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