Blind speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts: study (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Blind speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts: study (2016)

superlinguo.com

58 pointsrhyzomatic28 comments

1. We are born with the ability to gesture, and not something that is learned directly. So it is a in-born trait. You get the ability of speech, and gesturing tags along. (but most likely, evolutionary speaking, gesturing came first).

2. Gesturing is linked to speech/language. Different languages will have different gestures, not because they learned them, but by the grammatical structure/intonation of the language.

It will have been interesting to see multi-lingual people, and see if the level of gesturing changes when they switch language.

"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."

I wonder what it is about Italian that leads to the stereotype, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chironomia ?

It's likely the gestures have as heavy an accent as the speech in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSTAAs1Y-38

(:futurama fry:) Not sure if codified gesture, or ancient meme format.

Could be frequency, could be magnitude of the gestures, could be the gestures are more prominent/memorable/not subtle. Probably a combo, or, it's possible that the stereotype was centered around a few prominent individuals and is not actually a trait of that languages speakers.

It is not just Italians, but latin based languages (Spanish, French) are also known to use more gestures, while Germanic ones, a lot less... eg. German, Swedish folks almost come out as 'robotic' compared to Mediterranean countries.

I speak English and Spanish and I have almost no hand gestures. But I see other English speakers that are mono-lingual and they have extensive hand gestures. I wonder what is up with that?

I'm a Brazilian and I gesture a lot. People here in the US find it funny.

I was just participating in a conference over Zoom. For most people it was enough to just listen to the audio and look at the slides on their shared screen. For the one Italian speaker, you really needed to watch her hand gestures as well to get the full effect of the talk.

I went to high school in Japan for a year. Something that tripped me up for a while is the gesture for "come here". It's equivalent to the English gesture for "go away". (Try gesturing "go away" like you're shooing a bug away and "come here" like you want to tell someone a secret. Your hand flips 180 degrees, but it's basically the same gesture.)

My Indian coworkers shake their head side to side for yes and no. When I first starting working with them I was always a little mad that they never agreed with me until I realized what was going on.

You can tell if it's yes or no depending on speed but thanks to covid WFH for months I've forgotten which is which. Going back to the office is going to be an adjustment.

There are something like four distinct head-waggle motions with different meanings.

It may also be a bit confusing to many people as Indians tend to gently wobble their head when someone is talking to show that they're listening. I believe it's a sign of respect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj56IPJOqWE

The gestures are similar but are different. The Japanese version is typically performed with the arm in an upraised angle and is a quick repeated wave. For a go away gesture the arm is parallel to the ground

Sounds similar to the gesture for "come here" in Turkey and other Turkic countries. Which is interesting, given the putative shared origin of Japanese and Turkic languages (although the hypothesized membership of Japanese in an Altaic language superfamily is still very controversial).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Korean_and_Ja...

Does the atom of the movement change as well, or just the orientation of the hand/arm?

(I would make the "come here" gesture with my hand starting closer to the person and moving towards me, and the "go away" gesture in reverse, although it might be difficult to tell because the motion would be repeated and confounded with moving my hand/arm into place in either case.)

Not exactly sure what tripped you up. The palm is facing downwards, but the hand motion is opposite and easy to tell even if you're a foreigner. Source: am foreigner living in Japan

I've had a few confusing moments with train conductors shooing me off a train, but actually telling me to hurry up and get on.

What do they actually look like? I'm struggling to understand what two gestures are 180 degrees to each other.

As further warning, the Western fingers up "come here" gesture has an offensive connotation to the Japanese.

It would be interesting to know if there is any difference in the types of gestures employed https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/a-primer-on-communica...

http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_languag...

I tend to use metaphoric gestures a lot by splitting complicated subjects up into groups, and then using gestures to illustrate the group I am discussing at the moment.

I've read that in ASL, one may establish a "pronoun" by signing in a location, and then using that location as an endpoint for further signs. Is this true?

yes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002438411...

Yes

I'd love a study comparing Chimpanzee gestures to humans.

I'd expect similarities!

One think I noted is that as eye contact, and therefore line of sight is not so important for blind speakers, They tend to be more expressive with their head movements.

Url changed from https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/150001033323/blind-peop..., which points to this.

Thank you dang, I originally read the first link on my phone and didn't notice that it was quoting another blog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com