Humans are social beings, which means that inherent to their desire for understanding could be a universal non-verbal communication system as a research team from Georgia State University proposes in a new study. The team indicates that from an early age, our native language influences how we communicate information.
Language and Gesture Influence in Children
Georgia State University's Şeyda Özçalışkan, a professor at the university's Psychology Department and a native Turkish speaker, led a study exploring the relationship between language and gestures in children aged 3 to 12. Collaborating with researchers from the University of Chicago and Cornell University, Özçalışkan focused on how English and Turkish-speaking children used hand movements to convey actions.
The study, titled "What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought" published in the journal Language and Cognition, aimed to investigate whether gestures align with linguistic differences and at what age children adopt these patterns.
According to Özçalışkan, English and Turkish provide an ideal comparison due to variations in expressing events. Turkish, requiring a step-by-step description, contrasts with English's concise expressions.
In the study, 100 children described actions first verbally and with hand movements and then using only silent gestures. The findings revealed that when speaking and gesturing simultaneously, children's gestures mirrored their native language conventions. Turkish-speaking children ordered their gestures like sentences, while English-speaking children condensed theirs into single movements.
The correlation between gestures and language structure indicates that children enact scenes while describing them, with these language-specific patterns emerging around ages 3 to 4. Özçalışkan's research focuses on the cognitive aspects of children expressing ideas through gestures, revealing early developmental influences from language.
Examining gestures as a subset of non-verbal communication, including body language and facial expressions, Özçalışkan aims to comprehend how language affects thought processes during both verbal and silent expression, offering valuable insights into the complex interplay of language, cognition, and non-verbal communication in child development.
Universal Non-Verbal Communication Between Children and Blind Adults
Further in their study, they observed that the hand gestures of children surprisingly exhibited a remarkable similarity with each other when expressing scenes without words, which eliminates language-specific differences.
Özçalışkan and her team observed a parallel trend in their earlier research involving blind English and Turkish-speaking adults, indicating a consistent organization of gestures regardless of sight.
In contrast to prior studies on German and English-speaking children, this recent research directly compares speakers of different languages, suggesting the emergence of a potential universal non-verbal communication system during language acquisition.
Özçalışkan suggests that these fundamental structures resemble early sign languages, implying the existence of a shared gesture system that transcends language, hearing abilities, or sightedness.
The upcoming phase of the study seeks to examine blind Turkish and English-speaking children to evaluate the early manifestation of these patterns. This builds on previous research that demonstrated similarities in gestural behavior between blind and sighted adults.
While the idea is intriguing, the study's reliance on abstract gestures from a limited sample of toddlers, pre-teens, and adults warrants caution in making broad claims.
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