Keynote: Asli Özyürek
The role of gesture in production and comprehension of language: Insights from behavior and brain

Asli is giving a good keynote, presenting a good overview of current gesture theory. I do have some trouble to follow her presentation of two different ‘grand hypotheses’ about gestures and speech. She seems to polarize the work on gestures into two views, which may not be necessary in most cases. Poor old Krauss is still being held up as a straw man who thought gestures were not intended to communicate. In my own presentation I skipped this part, assuming everyone would already agree on gestures being movements intended to communicate, but it turns out that is not the case yet.

For example, Hedda is talking about fidgeting as ‘self-touch gestures’, disregarding the differences between movements that communicate and movements that are intended to communicate. Other people I talk too, are also sometimes questioning whether gestures are intended to communicate. Quite a surprise I must say. The overall level of knowledge of the current state of the work on gestures is surprisingly low. Kendon’s book of 2004, is not something you can rely on as a shared source of knowledge, for example. McNeill’s 1992 book is more or less common knowledge, but that includes some of the misconceptions that have arisen from that book. For example, people are not properly aware of the limited scope of McNeill’s 1992 book: It was solely about certain types of co-speech gestures. It was not about all gestures. And the difference is very important if you are talking, as I did, about emblems. Or if you consider, like Kendon (1995), the differences between emblems and other gestures, to be graded.

Anyway, Asli is using the opportunity to recount all the ‘Sylvester and Tweety Bird’ work that followed McNeill’s work. Bit by bit she is demonstrating the extent to which gestures and speech are intertwined. This is really a classic collection of work, performed by her and by her colleagues and other co-researchers.

Some quotes:
“gestural differences (in study 1) are not due to deep culture and language-specific representation”
“gesturers from all language backgrounds used an SOV order when asked to pantomime something without speech…. We sometimes refer to it as the cognitive deault language…”
“what can be packaged semantically in a clause determines the gesture… the effect is not absolute!”

She also presents the work on brain research, done at the FC Donders centre with Hagoort and Willems.
Quite a few questions from different directions.