Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

November 30, 2023 8:47 AM

"People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. [...] Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus."

"Earlier this year [2016] a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the way they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. [...] The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers."

posted by mhoye (35 comments total)

Humans are weird beasts in the most fascinating ways sometimes.

Also, I feel much better now about my tendency to make gestures while on Teams calls where I am not on camera.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:03 AM on November 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

This is really interesting. I’ve had some weird cognitive stuff happening the last few years, and one thing I’ve noticed is that that I can’t “construct” a verbal sentence without a lot of gesturing. I can’t “find” the words and I can’t put them together with first doing hands-in-the-air things. Writing sentences doesn’t require gestures, however. I wish there were videos, I’d love to see what kind of gesturing other people do. Thanks for posting!
posted by Silvery Fish at 9:14 AM on November 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Damn, that’s fascinating.
posted by egypturnash at 9:17 AM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve had some weird cognitive stuff happening the last few years, and one thing I’ve noticed is that that I can’t “construct” a verbal sentence without a lot of gesturing. I can’t “find” the words and I can’t put them together with first doing hands-in-the-air things.

I am learning French and I often have exactly that experience. Now I wonder if I gesture in French or in English and if I would get better at French faster if I actively learned to gesture in French.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:23 AM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's not particularly surprising given the vast similarities in body language across the entire world. It's so uniform that we only bother making lists of the exceptions.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:34 AM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should read through all the resources first, but how do they differentiate from someone (i.e. a sighted family member) teaching them gestures physically?

I once had the honor to have dinner with Ursula Bellugi, who showed that sign language was a natural language (in its second generation+). I asked her about poetry, rhyme, etc. She spent the evening teaching me. An incredible person in all respects.

Hint: think about what a rhyme is and you can start to make sense how you’d do it with sign: similar gestures.

I always wondered what other linguistic structures were out there that I’d never fathom due to my over reliance on auditory cues (and I’m a hand-gesturer).
posted by rubatan at 9:35 AM on November 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

God, the brain/language is AMAZING!

I remember after my stroke I couldn't get out so many words and would wind-up frustrated while repeating gestures as if the listener would be able to translate the movements. My speech has mostly come back to where people say they can't tell I had a stroke, although I can tell the difference. If I do get stuck on a word, being conscious of and emphasizing my gestures help my recall. I'm always talking with my hands/arms. Someone asked me if I have an Italian, and I do. I don't speak Italian, but my grandparents did. Curious.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:42 AM on November 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'd definitely like to see multiple reproductions of this, given the way sexy results have often fallen through later, but if so, I'm curious about the mechanism. Old nonverbal neural pathways being reused for language processing?
posted by tavella at 10:07 AM on November 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also, I feel much better now about my tendency to make gestures while on Teams calls where I am not on camera.

Often when I'm helping a customer in a webconference to resolve a technical issue and they're sharing their screen, I find myself pointing at something on their screen on my screen, as if they can see what I'm pointing at.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on November 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

My first reaction to this post was "oh neat, that's the same stuff Lauren Gawne from Lingthusiasm studies" and then I clicked the first link...which goes to Lauren Gawne's blog. Anyway, Lingthusiasm is great and worth a listen if you're into this sort of thing.
posted by Tesseractive at 11:01 AM on November 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

I'd always assumed gestures preceded spoken language but this makes a good argument that they evolved together in some way. Human language, spoken and gestured, is probably older than we thought.
posted by tommasz at 11:20 AM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus."

This is a non-sequitur. People gesture before they learn languages. There's no causation implied between gesturing and speaking.

IMHO it is more likely that gestures are part of ancestry. Easy enough to test by finding people that were raised in foreign environments.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:36 AM on November 30, 2023

Tavella: I'm curious about the mechanism. Old nonverbal neural pathways being reused for language processing?
Me too, I know nada about this, but I wondered if it might be a bit like synaesthesia where an argument could be made that neuro-transmitters from one brain area are bleeding across a sulcus to talk to a different adjacent one. Hence the somewhat limited repertoire of synaesthesic pairings [number to colour; letters to 3-D space].
The samples are small [N=20 per group; and fwiw the Turkish are much younger and more female than the English] but the χ² are quite strong. There's been seven years elapsed since the study, whc is time enough to do a replication. The paper has been cited 50+ times.

And as another Lingthusiasm fan, check out their 35 mins [+transcript] episode on Gesture
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:32 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

People gesture before they learn languages.

Uh, do they (necessarily)? And even if they do, that does not mean there is no connection between gesturing and speaking. It may be that gesturing could precede speech in some individuals but that does not negate the idea that gesturing and speaking are related. Indeed, the findings that English and Turkish speakers gesture differently from one another, but that blind Turkish speakers gesture similarly to sighted Turkish speakers (while still differently from English speakers, blind or otherwise) offers support to the idea that gesturing is on some level connected to grammar/speech.

IMHO it is more likely that gestures are part of ancestry.

Nobody, I think, is suggesting that the gestures are solely related to language (i.e., that there are no other reasons why some gestures are used). Certainly some gestures are influenced by culture (I'm reminded of the scene in Inglorious Basterds which contains an example of how the gesture for 3 among Germans is different from the English/Americans). The Nature excerpt gives one example of mirroring the pouring of a container with a C-shaped hand, which is a natural physical mime of the action one takes when pouring something, which I would not be surprised to learn is more-or-less universal. OTOH there is no inherent/universal reason why gesturing for 3 should or should not include the thumb (or any other digit, modulo physiological reasons). Most people have probably seen both index-middle-ring and middle-ring-pinky gestures indicating 3, for example, never mind the thumb-index-middle German variant.
posted by axiom at 12:41 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

My children learned to gesture before they spoke more than Dadada or momma. For example, they would hold both hands up when they wanted to be picked up.

It is a fascinating subject. I am always fascinated by public speakers and what they do with their hands while speaking. There are differences when standing behind a lectern and when standing free of anything. Watch a news presenter when they are standing in front of a green screen. You can see them fighting to hold their hands in their lap or by their side. It can't be unseen either. As soon as I see someone using hand gestures that seem exagerated or out of the ordinary, I cannot sop focusing on it.

Watch a public speaker when the camera is only on their portrait or face and when it has a full body shot. It will seem like two different speeches or talks when it is the same just different camera angles.

I have no expertise whatsoever on gestures, but it sure is fascinating.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 1:02 PM on November 30, 2023

Babies can be taught ASL before they can speak.
posted by Mitheral at 1:11 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

>People gesture before they learn languages.

Uh, do they (necessarily)?

I haven't spent a lot of time raising kids, but that's what the Nature article above says:

Gestures are produced by speakers from
all cultural and linguistic backgrounds
and emerge in young children even before
the development of language

posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:49 PM on November 30, 2023

OTOH there is no inherent/universal reason why gesturing for 3 should or should not include the thumb (or any other digit, modulo physiological reasons). Most people have probably seen both index-middle-ring and middle-ring-pinky gestures indicating 3, for example, never mind the thumb-index-middle German variant.

This is the kind of information I wish was in the articles. Did they ask the blind subjects to indicate the number 3 in the local gesture dialect and get reliably different results in different cultures? Did American's pop up the middle finger and English people give the reverse V? How specific are we talking here.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:54 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

And to add to this, singers use the whole body when singing and once you start watching, especially their hand gestures, it is extra interesting.
posted by mightshould at 2:22 PM on November 30, 2023

This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

Counterpoint: Spanish-speaking speaking people from Buenos Aires gesture in a way quite similar to Italians (because many of them are descended from Italians). Spanish-speaking people in, for example, Mexico, do not gesture in this way at all. Seems like the Argentinians absolutely did learn their gestures from other looking at other speakers.
posted by ssg at 2:31 PM on November 30, 2023

Brief vocab moment! Non-speaking and non-verbal are not the same. One is about the words coming out the mouth, and the other is about the words in the head (or signed, or typed, et cetera). People can be non-speaking and still be verbal.
posted by aniola at 2:35 PM on November 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

gesturing is on some level connected to grammar/speech.

There is a small (but I think growing) number of linguists who are researching the connection between gesture and speech. One of the biggest crossovers is with prosody: gestures appear to be timed in relation to the prosody of the language, occurring at important prosodic landmarks. For this to occur, the cognitive systems governing gesture have to be at least somewhat "aware" of the prosodic structure/grammar of a language.

That's not to say all properties of gesture are a part of language, or anything, but that these systems interact heavily and speech and non-speech communication is not as strictly divided in the brain as some people would say.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:45 PM on November 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

In development gestures would seem to precede language in that we reach out, grasp at things (and often bring them to our mouths where we then do complicated things with our lips, teeth, tongues and jaws, not to mention our throats and swallowing apparatus and its interplay with breathing, interestingly enough), run our fingers over them, etc.

In evolutionary terms gestures would also come first, I’d think, and a lot of those gestures would have to do with food acquisition and consumption.

Our mouths and faces are singulariy unsuited to being stuck down into food sources, so it seems that a lot of food getting things other animals do with mouths and heads have been transferred to our hands and arms, which has allowed us to dispense with protruding snouts and really sharp teeth and adapt our mouths to language.
posted by jamjam at 3:11 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

It tracks with what my 11 month old does - his first gesture (even before holding his arms out to be picked up, which *is* genetic because all babies do it) was to put his hands together and bring them back and forth to his mouth while going wah-wah-wah (think the old, racist imitation of an American Indian). It means he wants his bottle, which he holds in both hands and brings to his mouth.

I tried to teach the ASL for 'milk' and 'hungry' when he was breastfeeding, but they didn't stick, while he uses this gesture now pretty regularly.
posted by subdee at 4:53 PM on November 30, 2023

Just reflecting on the comments, some gestures are more in the way of mimicry or pantomime, and others are more the prosody thing, like the stereotypical "italian hands" moving in sync with intonation and emphasis.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:43 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I kinda miss how this is surprising. Obviously it would be weird if blind people evolved separately from sighted people. Deaf people vocalize, too. There's no mystery here. Blind people dance. Deaf people dance, too.

Our propensity for expression and exploration of the physical world through our senses and bodies are a mixture of evolved ability and conditioned reciprocity. Our arms were born to express our voices. Our voices were born to express our bodies. Christ, do blind people have facial expressions? Damn right, they do. That this might be unintuitive baffles me.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:44 PM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

It doesn't seem that intuitive to me that blind Turkish speakers would use different gestures from blind English speakers. I wonder if all English speakers use the same gestures, or if American English gestures are different from British English gestures are different from Indian (South Asian) English gestures.

I wonder if people who gesture are understood better and so you're sort of rewarded for using the right kinds of gestures at the same time that you're learning to speak. Even if the blind people can't see the gestures, the sighted people they are speaking with can.
posted by subdee at 6:52 PM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is fascinating, and I wonder to what extent it would (in theory—in practice, doing so would break several ethical guidelines) reconstruct ancient gestural practices if children were raised speaking dead languages. Thinking especially of Michel de Montaigne, who was famously brought up to speak Latin as a first language—if he were blind, how might he have gestured when he spoke it?

In a more actionable vein of speculation—I wonder whether it's the speaker's first language or the language they're currently speaking that's reflected in their gestures, if the two are distinct from one another. Would a blind speaker of both English and Turkish change their gestures when switching between the two languages?
posted by the tartare yolk at 7:34 PM on November 30, 2023

I think another interesting part of this, given that sometimes the blind kids were talking to blind people, is that it seems that gesturing helps people compile and understand their own thoughts. It's making motions in the world to help your brain form the right words to say?
posted by lauranesson at 8:12 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

In a book called the Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul, there's an extended section on gesture and various studies. Vastly paraphrasing and potentially misremembering (I may get the book out tomorrow), there was a finding that forcing people to keep their hand still (sit on your hands essentially) led to them producing less creative ideas. And there was something about your gestures starting to convey the meaning of what you're about to say slightly before words.

When preparing for a moot during law school, we were taught to keep our hands still and grip the podium, and I always found this deeply unnatural. The rationale was that they're distracting. It makes sense as advice to someone who's very nervous and not confident, because they'll tend to make confusing and distracting hand gestures. But for someone who thoroughly understands what they're saying, the gestures help to convey meaning, not distract from it.
posted by lookoutbelow at 1:07 AM on December 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you actually look at the study's results (on page 6 of the PDF), the difference between Turkish and English speakers was hardly universal. In fact, both Turkish and English speakers did the same motions more often than not. There was a difference in the average number of each blind person using each type of motion between the two languages, but it was small. This doesn't look particularly convincing to me as evidence for the pretty major claim being made here.
posted by ssg at 1:36 PM on December 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Singing and hand gestures? I don't find them natural. But then, I have been heavily steeped in choral traditions. When I've sung other things, the gestures had to be conscious and forced. But that's mainly because they had no harmonic affects. LOL
posted by Goofyy at 3:23 PM on December 1, 2023

Really interesting. I did some work with a professor in grad school who specialised in studying communication and rhetoric around risk. She did a lot of research on coal miners internationally, and I remember the surprising finding that the gestures miners used to communicate underground had numerous universal commonalities, in spite of language difference. This seems to run contrary to the findings in the second article on Turkish and English speakers, but if I recall, the risk environment underground was a shared embodied experience, from which common gestures emerged, so perhaps it's a similar effect to to the grammatical basis of gesture, rather than visual.
posted by amusebuche at 4:27 AM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Writing sentences doesn’t require gestures, however.

I need to do gestures when writing, too. I'll have to wave my pen around, or take my hands off the keyboard, if I get stuck. I'm a very visual person and I thought it was connected to that, but it seems it's something different.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:25 AM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

I need to do gestures when writing, too. …

Very interesting comment, TCITL.

It hadn’t occurred to me until I read your comment, but the act of writing itself is a gesture, and written words a visible history of gestures, so perhaps it’s not too much to wonder whether the apparently inherently gestural quality of language predisposed us to develop writing.
posted by jamjam at 8:01 PM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]