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Imagine a child who has never seen or heard any language at all. Would such a child be able to invent a language on her own? Despite what one might guess, the answer to this question is "yes". I describe children who are congenitally deaf and cannot learn the spoken language that surrounds them. In addition, they have not yet been exposed to sign language, either by their hearing parents or their oral schools. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate – they gesture – and those gestures take on many of the forms and functions of language. The properties of language that we find in the deaf children's gestures are just those properties that do not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be reinvented by a child de novo. They are the resilient properties of language, properties that all children, deaf or hearing, come to language-learning ready to develop.
In contrast to the deaf children whose gestures assume the full burden of language, hearing children produce gestures along with speech and those gestures share the burden of communication with that speech. Unlike the deaf children’s gestures which are discrete and segmented in form and look more like beads on a string than one continuous strand, hearing children’s gestures are global and holistic. In this form, gesture is not only able to convey substantive information but to convey information that is different from the information conveyed in speech. Indeed, at the earliest stages of language-learning and throughout development, the gestures that hearing children produce when they talk often mismatch that speech. And when they do, those mismatching gestures indicate that a child is ready to learn.
Thus, gesture is versatile in form and function. Under certain circumstances, gesture can substitute for speech, and when it does, it embodies the resilient properties of language. Under other circumstances, gesture can form a fully integrated system with speech and can predict when and how a child will learn.
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Susan Goldin-Meadow
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Irving B. Harris Professor at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor's degree from Smith College after spending a year abroad studying psychology at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva with Barbel Inhelder and Hermine Sinclair. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of Rochel Gelman and Lila Gleitman. She is currently a member of the Department of Psychology and the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago where she has taught for 27 years. She has received both the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for Graduate Teaching and the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. The year spent at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva piqued her interest in the relationship between language and thought, interests she continued to pursue at Penn. There she began her studies exploring whether children who lack a (usable) model for language can nevertheless create a language with their hands. This interest in how the manual modality can serve the needs of communication and thinking led to her current work on the gestures that accompany speech in hearing individuals. Her studies have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke. She recently completed a 5 year term as a member of the Language and Communication review panel for the National Institutes of Health, and was a member of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development that was sponsored by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine and produced From Neurons to Neighborhoods. She is currently president of the Cognitive Development Society and the editor of the new journal Language Learning and Development sponsored by the Society of Language Development. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship, she wrote two books and edited a third, all published in 2003: Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think, Harvard University Press; The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language, Psychology Press; Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought (co-edited with Dedre Gentner), MIT Press.
website:http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/.
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