When using gestures, rules of grammar remain the same

The mind apparently has a consistent way of ordering an event that defies the order in which subjects, verbs, and objects typically appear in languages, according to research at the University of Chicago.

"Not surprisingly, speakers of different languages describe events using the word orders prescribed by their language. The surprise is that when the same speakers are asked to 'speak' with their hands and not their mouths, they ignore these orders – they all use exactly the same order when they gesture," said Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Bearsdley Rum Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and lead author of the paper, "The Natural Order of Events: How Speakers of Different Languages Represent Events Nonverbally" published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, the team tested 40 speakers of four different languages: 10 English, 10 Mandarin Chinese, 10 Spanish and 10 Turkish speakers. They showed them simple video sequences of activities and asked them to describe the action first in speech and a second time using only gestures. They also gave another 40 speakers of the same languages transparencies to assemble after watching the video sequences. Some of the videos portrayed real people and others animated toys that represented a variety of sentence types: a girl waves, a duck moves to a wheelbarrow, a woman twists a knob and a girl gives a flower to man.

When asked to describe the scenes in speech, the speakers used the word orders typical of their respective languages. English, Spanish, and Chinese speakers first produced the subject, followed by the verb, and then the object (woman twists knob). Turkish speakers first produced the subject, followed by the object, and then the verb (woman knob twists).

But when asked to describe the same scenes using only their hands, all of the adults, no matter what language they spoke, produced the same order –– subject, object, verb (woman knob twists). When asked to assemble the transparencies after watching the video sequences (another nonverbal task, but one that is not communicative), people also tended to follow the subject, object, verb ordering found in the gestures produced without speech.

The grammars of modern languages developed over time and are the result of very distant cultural considerations that are difficult for linguists to study.

Newly emerging sign languages, however, offer intriguing corroborating evidence that the subject-object-verb (SOV) order is a fundamental one.

SOV is the order currently emerging in a language created spontaneously without any external influence. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language arose within the last 70 years in an isolated community with a high incidence of profound prelingual deafness. In the space of one generation, the language assumed grammatical structure, including the SOV order.

Moreover, when deaf children invent their own gesture systems, they use OV order. Chinese and American deaf children, whose hearing losses prevent them from acquiring spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use the OV order in the gesture sentences they create.

The research challenges the idea that the language we speak inevitably shapes the way we think when we are not speaking. This study is the first to test the notion with respect to word order.

"Our data suggest that the ordering we use when representing events in a nonverbal format is not highly susceptible to language's influence," Goldin-Meadow and her co-authors write. "Rather, there appears to be a natural order that humans use when asked to represent events nonverbally. Indeed, the influence may well go in the other direction—the ordering seen in our nonverbal tasks may shape language in its emerging stages."

Source: University of Chicago

Related stories:

'Perfect Pitch' in Humans Far More Prevalent than Expected
Researchers at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have developed a unique test for perfect pitch, and have found surprising results.
JAJAH turns mobile telephones into translation tools
Internet voice telephony firm JAJAH on Thursday launched a first-of-its-kind free service that lets English and Mandarin speakers use mobile telephones to translate conversations.
Scientists find connection between mental fitness and multi-lingualism
Children who speak a second or third language may have an unexpected advantage later in life, a new Tel Aviv University study has found. Knowing and speaking many languages may protect the brain against the effects of aging.
Bringing down the language barrier... automatically
Progress being made by European researchers on automatic speech-to-speech translation technology could help the EU tackle one of the biggest remaining boundaries to internal trade, mobility and the free exchange of information – language.
Running words together: The science behind cross-linguistic psychology
While communication may be recognized as a universal phenomenon, differences between languages -- ranging from word-order to semantics -- undoubtedly remain as they help to define culture and develop language. Yet, little is understood about similarities and differences in languages around the world and how they affect communication. Recently, however, two studies have emerged that aid in our understanding of cross-linguistic distinctions in language usage.
Linguist tunes in to pitch processing in brain
More of the brain is busy processing pitch from language and other sounds than previously thought, according to a researcher in neurophonetics at Purdue University.
Probing Question: What is lost when a language dies?
Oy vey! Although English dictionaries list "Oh dear!" as a rough equivalent of this Yiddish expression, Yiddishists will tell you how short that falls in conveying the phrase's varied, flexible and nuanced meanings, ranging from sadness and worry to aggravation, anger and tiredness.
Breaking New Ground in Relationship of Language to Thought
Jürgen Bohnemeyer, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, has received a 42-month $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a comparative study of the representation of space in 15 indigenous languages of Guatemala and Mexico, many of which are severely under-documented and endangered.

News discussion:

Medicine & Health news