David McNeill (Chicago psychologist)
Encyclopedia
Professor David McNeill (born 1933 in California
, USA) is an American
psychologist
and writer
specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics
and especially the relationship of language
to thought
, and the gesture
s that accompany discourse.
professor
of psychology
and linguistics
. He is Professor Emeritus
at the University of Chicago
in Illinois
, USA, and a writer
.
in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy
in 1962, both in psychology, at the University of California
, Berkeley, California
, USA. He went on to study at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University
in 1963.
and Sigma Xi
and holding several academic fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship
in 1973-1974, McNeill was Gustaf Stern Lecturer at the University of Göteborg, Sweden
in 1999; and Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2002–2005.
In 1995, McNeill won the Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, University of Chicago; and in 1995 he was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award
from the University of Chicago Press
for the book Hand and Mind.
In 2003, the National-Louis University
(a multi-campus institution in Chicago) Office of Institutional Management Grants Center received an American Psychological Association
Grant for Gale Stam Psychology College of Arts and Sciences to provide "a Festschrift
conference honoring Professor David McNeill of the University of Chicago."
, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language
to thought
, and the gesture
s that accompany discourse.
In his research, McNeill has studied videoed discourses of the same stimulus stories being retold "together with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by "speakers of different languages, [...] by non-native speakers at different stages of learning English, by children at various ages, by adolescent deaf
children not exposed to language models, and by speakers with neurological impairments (aphasic
, right hemisphere
damaged, and split-brain
patients)."
This and other research has formed the subject matter of a number of books which McNeill has written through his career.
and is central to his work on gestures, specifically those spontaneous and unwitting hand movements that regularly accompany informal speech. The growth point, or GP, posits that gestures and speech are unified and need to be considered jointly. For McNeill, gestures are in effect (or, McNeill would say, in reality) the speaker’s thought in action, and integral components of speech, not merely accompaniments or additions. Much evidence supports this idea, but its full implications have not always been recognized.
, as a kind of sign, a gesture is global (in that the meanings of the ‘parts’ – the hand shapes, space, direction, articulation – depend in a top-down fashion on the meaning of the whole) and synthetic (in that several meanings are bundled into one gesture). Gestures, when they combine, do not form what Ferdinand de Saussure
terms syntagmatic values; they paint a more elaborate picture but contain nothing corresponding to the emerging syntagmatic value of a noun as a direct object when combined with a verb (“hit the ball”, where “ball”, by itself, is not a direct object). Speech contrasts on each of these points: it is bottom-up, analytic and combinatoric.
The synchronization of speech and gesture is the key to this theoretical GP unit. Gestures offer one kind of symbol, language a different kind. These two kinds, when synchronized in a GP, bring semiotically opposite modes of thinking together at the same time. This synchrony of opposites sets in motion a dialectic of imagery and linguistic form that is the ‘fuel’ of the dynamic dimension of language in which forms emerge, say their piece, and disappear. The gestures coincide with speech, and the resulting dialectic is a model of this dimension.
In one example, a speaker describes an episode in a cartoon she has watched: “He goes up thróugh the pipe this time.” (In this example, boldface type indicates where the gesture movements occurred; the accent indicates speech emphasis.) At “up” the hand rises upward; at “thróugh” the fingers spread outward to create an interior space. These movements take place concurrently and in synchrony with “up thróugh”, the linguistic package that carries the same meanings. This creates a joint realization of the idea of upward motion and interiority, with interiority highlighted in both gesture (the flayed-out fingers) and speech (the accented vowel). But the speech divides the event into semantic units – a directed path (“up”), plus the idea of interiority (“through”), which must be combined to obtain the composite meaning of the whole. In the gesture, this composite meaning is fused into one symbol and the semantic units are simultaneous. The synchronized speech and gesture are co-expressive but semiotically non-redundant.
A GP forms a single mental package or idea unit out of these semiotically opposed components. McNeill argues that this semiotic opposition is unstable, and that the processes initiated to resolve it, called ‘unpacking’, propel thought and speech forward. This creates a new form of human cognition that animates language and gives it a dynamic dimension.
in defining a ‘unit’ as the smallest package that retains the quality of being a whole, in this case the whole of a gesture-language unity, McNeill calls the minimal psychological unit a Growth Point because it is meant to be the initial pulse of thinking-for-(and while)-speaking, out of which a dynamic process of organization emerges. The linguistic component of speech categorizes the visual and actional imagery of the gesture; the imagery of the gesture grounds the linguistic categories in a visual spatial frame.
McNeill furthers this conception of the material carrier by turning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
for insight into the duality of gesture and language. Gesture, the instantaneous, global, nonconventional component, is “not an external accompaniment” of speech, which is the sequential, analytic, combinatoric component; it is not a “representation” of meaning, but instead meaning “inhabits” it. Merleau-Ponty links gesture and existential significance:
For McNeill, the GP is a mechanism geared to this “existential significance” of speech – this “taking up a position in the world”. Gesture, as part of the GP, is inhabited by the same “living meaning” that inhabits the word (and beyond, the whole of a discourse). A deeper answer to the query, therefore – when we see a gesture, what are we seeing? – is that we see part of the speaker’s current cognitive being, her very mental existence, at the moment it occurs. This too is part of the origin of language by Mead's Loop (and explains the gestural leakage of lies. By performing the gesture, a core idea is brought into concrete existence and becomes part of the speaker’s own existence at that moment. A gesture is not a representation, or is not only such: it is a form of being. From a first-person perspective, the gesture is part of the immediate existence of the speaker. Gestures (and words, etc., as well) are themselves thinking in one of its many forms – not only expressions of thought, but thought, i.e., cognitive being, itself. To the speaker, gesture and speech are not only ‘messages’ or communications, but are a way of cognitively existing, of cognitively being, at the moment of speaking.
To make a gesture, from this perspective, is to bring thought into existence on a concrete plane, just as writing out a word can have a similar effect. The greater the felt departure of the thought from the immediate context, the more likely is its materialization in a gesture, because of this contribution to being. Conversely, when ‘newsworthiness’ is minimal materialization diminishes and in some cases disappears, even though a GP is active; in these cases gestures may cease while (empty) speech continues, or vice versa, speech ceases and a vague gesture takes place. Thus, gestures are more or less elaborated and GPs more or less materialized depending on the importance of material realization to the existence of the thought.
: Can the theory in question explain the observed speech-gesture-thought unity of human cognition? The widely popular ‘gesture-first’ theory, according to which language began as pure gesture without speech, fails this test. In fact, it fails it twice, predicting what did not evolve (that speech supplanted gesture) and not predicting what did evolve (our own speech-gesture unity). An alternative, which McNeill calls ‘Mead's Loop’ after the philosopher George Herbert Mead
, explains this unity. It too claims that gesture was essential to the origin of language, but not because it was ‘primitive’ or more accessible. Rather, it says that speech could not have evolved without gesture; neither could gesture have evolved without speech. Speech and gesture originated together, at the same time, in response to the same selection pressures.
The link between the GP and self-aware agency also appears in children’s language development, which can be linked to the origin of language in a version of the long-dismissed ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ hypothesis of recapitulation theory
. McNeill considers that when something emerges in current-day ontogenesis only at a certain stage of development, the original natural selection of the feature (if there was any) might have taken place in a similar psychological milieu in phylogenesis. This opens a window onto the mindset of the creature in which the Mead's Loop ‘twist’ was evolving. As a mode of reasoning, it exploits the fact that children’s intellectual status is not fixed but changing. Thus, McNeill argues, we look for new states that seem pegged to steps in the ontogenesis of GPs and Mead's Loop underlying them, and consider these steps as possible signals from ancient phylogenesis. Evidence shows that self-aware agency could be such a signal. The GP emerges around age 3 or 4 years, which is also about when children first become aware of themselves as agents, since before that age the speech and gestures of children have “…the character of ‘sharing’ experiences with the other rather than of ‘communicating’ messages to the Other”, as put by Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan in their 1963 book, Symbol Formation. The theory of mind
(which is really awareness of other perspectives) also emerges about this time, and likewise depends on self-aware agency.
A 1991 article in the Chicago Reader; a 2006 article in the Scientific American
, Mind
magazine; and a 2008 article in Boston Globe describe McNeill's work on the language of gesture in detail.
The Acquisition of Language was reviewed in the International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders in 1971.
The Conceptual Basis of Language was reviewed in The Conceptual Basis of Language in 1980.
Hand and Mind was reviewed in Language and Speech; the American Journal of Psychology
; and Language
in 1994.
Gesture and Thought was reviewed in Language in Society and Metaphor and Symbol in 2007.
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, USA) is an American
People of the United States
The people of the United States, also known as simply Americans or American people, are the inhabitants or citizens of the United States. The United States is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
and writer
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
and especially the relationship of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
to thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
, and the gesture
Gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body...
s that accompany discourse.
Life and career
David McNeill is an AmericanPeople of the United States
The people of the United States, also known as simply Americans or American people, are the inhabitants or citizens of the United States. The United States is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. He is Professor Emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...
at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, USA, and a writer
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
.
Education
McNeill studied for and was awarded a Bachelor of ArtsBachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1962, both in psychology, at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
, Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, USA. He went on to study at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1963.
Academic positions held
- Harvard University, Research Fellow, Center for Cognitive Studies (1963–1965)
- University of Michigan, Assistant to Associate Professor of Psychology (1965–1969)
- Harvard University, Visiting Associate Professor of Psychology (1967–1969)
- University of Chicago, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics (1969–2001)
- Institute for Advanced StudyInstitute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
, Princeton, Member (1973–1975) - University of Chicago, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics Emeritus (2001–)
- Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, Fellow (1983–1984)
- Duke University, Department of Anthropology, Visiting Professor (1984)
- University of Chicago, Chair, Department of Psychology (1991–1997)
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Visitor (1998–1999)
Honours and awards
As well as being a member of Phi Beta KappaPhi Beta Kappa Society
The Phi Beta Kappa Society is an academic honor society. Its mission is to "celebrate and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences"; and induct "the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at America’s leading colleges and universities." Founded at The College of William and...
and Sigma Xi
Sigma Xi
Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society is a non-profit honor society which was founded in 1886 at Cornell University by a junior faculty member and a handful of graduate students. Members elect others on the basis of their research achievements or potential...
and holding several academic fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
in 1973-1974, McNeill was Gustaf Stern Lecturer at the University of Göteborg, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
in 1999; and Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2002–2005.
In 1995, McNeill won the Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, University of Chicago; and in 1995 he was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award
Gordon J. Laing Award
The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the...
from the University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
for the book Hand and Mind.
In 2003, the National-Louis University
National-Louis University
National–Louis University is a private non-profit American university. NLU has campuses in and near Chicago, Illinois, as well as in Wisconsin, Florida, and Nowy Sącz, Poland. Many NLU courses and programs are also offered at-a-distance. The university practices multi-campus, at-a-distance, and...
(a multi-campus institution in Chicago) Office of Institutional Management Grants Center received an American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
Grant for Gale Stam Psychology College of Arts and Sciences to provide "a Festschrift
Festschrift
In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...
conference honoring Professor David McNeill of the University of Chicago."
Research
McNeill specializes in psycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
to thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
, and the gesture
Gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body...
s that accompany discourse.
In his research, McNeill has studied videoed discourses of the same stimulus stories being retold "together with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by "speakers of different languages, [...] by non-native speakers at different stages of learning English, by children at various ages, by adolescent deaf
Hearing impairment
-Definition:Deafness is the inability for the ear to interpret certain or all frequencies of sound.-Environmental Situations:Deafness can be caused by environmental situations such as noise, trauma, or other ear defections...
children not exposed to language models, and by speakers with neurological impairments (aphasic
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
, right hemisphere
Cerebral hemisphere
A cerebral hemisphere is one of the two regions of the eutherian brain that are delineated by the median plane, . The brain can thus be described as being divided into left and right cerebral hemispheres. Each of these hemispheres has an outer layer of grey matter called the cerebral cortex that is...
damaged, and split-brain
Split-brain
Split-brain is a lay term to describe the result when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. The surgical operation to produce this condition is called corpus callosotomy and is usually used as a last resort to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy...
patients)."
This and other research has formed the subject matter of a number of books which McNeill has written through his career.
Central idea
The growth point is a key theoretical concept in McNeill’s approach to psycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
and is central to his work on gestures, specifically those spontaneous and unwitting hand movements that regularly accompany informal speech. The growth point, or GP, posits that gestures and speech are unified and need to be considered jointly. For McNeill, gestures are in effect (or, McNeill would say, in reality) the speaker’s thought in action, and integral components of speech, not merely accompaniments or additions. Much evidence supports this idea, but its full implications have not always been recognized.
Growth Points and multi-modality
McNeill argues that thought is multimodal – both vocal-linguistic and manual-gestural – and the resulting semiotic opposition fuels change. In terms of semioticsSemiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, as a kind of sign, a gesture is global (in that the meanings of the ‘parts’ – the hand shapes, space, direction, articulation – depend in a top-down fashion on the meaning of the whole) and synthetic (in that several meanings are bundled into one gesture). Gestures, when they combine, do not form what Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
terms syntagmatic values; they paint a more elaborate picture but contain nothing corresponding to the emerging syntagmatic value of a noun as a direct object when combined with a verb (“hit the ball”, where “ball”, by itself, is not a direct object). Speech contrasts on each of these points: it is bottom-up, analytic and combinatoric.
The synchronization of speech and gesture is the key to this theoretical GP unit. Gestures offer one kind of symbol, language a different kind. These two kinds, when synchronized in a GP, bring semiotically opposite modes of thinking together at the same time. This synchrony of opposites sets in motion a dialectic of imagery and linguistic form that is the ‘fuel’ of the dynamic dimension of language in which forms emerge, say their piece, and disappear. The gestures coincide with speech, and the resulting dialectic is a model of this dimension.
In one example, a speaker describes an episode in a cartoon she has watched: “He goes up thróugh the pipe this time.” (In this example, boldface type indicates where the gesture movements occurred; the accent indicates speech emphasis.) At “up” the hand rises upward; at “thróugh” the fingers spread outward to create an interior space. These movements take place concurrently and in synchrony with “up thróugh”, the linguistic package that carries the same meanings. This creates a joint realization of the idea of upward motion and interiority, with interiority highlighted in both gesture (the flayed-out fingers) and speech (the accented vowel). But the speech divides the event into semantic units – a directed path (“up”), plus the idea of interiority (“through”), which must be combined to obtain the composite meaning of the whole. In the gesture, this composite meaning is fused into one symbol and the semantic units are simultaneous. The synchronized speech and gesture are co-expressive but semiotically non-redundant.
A GP forms a single mental package or idea unit out of these semiotically opposed components. McNeill argues that this semiotic opposition is unstable, and that the processes initiated to resolve it, called ‘unpacking’, propel thought and speech forward. This creates a new form of human cognition that animates language and gives it a dynamic dimension.
Minimal units
Speech and gesture, taken together, comprise minimal units of human linguistic cognition. Following Lev VygotskyLev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of cultural-historical psychology, and the leader of the Vygotsky Circle.-Biography:...
in defining a ‘unit’ as the smallest package that retains the quality of being a whole, in this case the whole of a gesture-language unity, McNeill calls the minimal psychological unit a Growth Point because it is meant to be the initial pulse of thinking-for-(and while)-speaking, out of which a dynamic process of organization emerges. The linguistic component of speech categorizes the visual and actional imagery of the gesture; the imagery of the gesture grounds the linguistic categories in a visual spatial frame.
Non-modularity
The GP theory contrasts to ‘modular’ theories such as those of Willem Levelt (:de:Willem Levelt), which posit a sequence in which thinking precedes and speech follows. A sequence of thinking before speaking has no place in the growth point. In a GP, speech and thought are inseparable, unified, and simultaneous.Connections to phenomenology
McNeill employs the concept of “material carriers” – a phrase used by Vygotsky to refer to the embodiment of meaning in enactments or material experiences – to further develop the concepts of Mead’s Loop and the GP. A material carrier enhances the symbolization’s representational power. The concept implies that the gesture, the actual motion of the gesture itself, is a dimension of meaning. This enhancement is possible if the gesture is the very image; not an ‘expression’ or ‘representation’ of it, but it. From this viewpoint, a gesture is an image in its most developed – that is, its most materially, naturally embodied – form. The absence of a gesture is the converse, an image in its least material form. The material carrier concept thus helps explain how an imagery-language dialectic can take place in absence of gesture. When no gesture occurs, there is still global-synthetic imagery in a dialectic with linguistic categorization, but we experience it at the lowest level of materialization. It is not an alteration of the dialectic of its essentials – the simultaneous rendering of meaning in opposite semiotic modes – but a bleached version of it.McNeill furthers this conception of the material carrier by turning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
for insight into the duality of gesture and language. Gesture, the instantaneous, global, nonconventional component, is “not an external accompaniment” of speech, which is the sequential, analytic, combinatoric component; it is not a “representation” of meaning, but instead meaning “inhabits” it. Merleau-Ponty links gesture and existential significance:
The link between the word and its living meaning is not an external accompaniment to intellectual processes, the meaning inhabits the word, and language ‘is not an external accompaniment to intellectual processes’. We are therefore led to recognize a gestural or existential significance to speech. … Language certainly has inner content, but this is not self-subsistent and self-conscious thought. What then does language express, if it does not express thoughts? It presents or rather it is the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his meanings. (emphasis in the original)
For McNeill, the GP is a mechanism geared to this “existential significance” of speech – this “taking up a position in the world”. Gesture, as part of the GP, is inhabited by the same “living meaning” that inhabits the word (and beyond, the whole of a discourse). A deeper answer to the query, therefore – when we see a gesture, what are we seeing? – is that we see part of the speaker’s current cognitive being, her very mental existence, at the moment it occurs. This too is part of the origin of language by Mead's Loop (and explains the gestural leakage of lies. By performing the gesture, a core idea is brought into concrete existence and becomes part of the speaker’s own existence at that moment. A gesture is not a representation, or is not only such: it is a form of being. From a first-person perspective, the gesture is part of the immediate existence of the speaker. Gestures (and words, etc., as well) are themselves thinking in one of its many forms – not only expressions of thought, but thought, i.e., cognitive being, itself. To the speaker, gesture and speech are not only ‘messages’ or communications, but are a way of cognitively existing, of cognitively being, at the moment of speaking.
To make a gesture, from this perspective, is to bring thought into existence on a concrete plane, just as writing out a word can have a similar effect. The greater the felt departure of the thought from the immediate context, the more likely is its materialization in a gesture, because of this contribution to being. Conversely, when ‘newsworthiness’ is minimal materialization diminishes and in some cases disappears, even though a GP is active; in these cases gestures may cease while (empty) speech continues, or vice versa, speech ceases and a vague gesture takes place. Thus, gestures are more or less elaborated and GPs more or less materialized depending on the importance of material realization to the existence of the thought.
Language origin and Mead’s Loop
In terms of the origin of language, the GP ‘predicts’ (of the remote past) that whatever evolved led to a GP system of semiotic oppositions. This provides an empirical test of all theories on the origin of languageOrigin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
: Can the theory in question explain the observed speech-gesture-thought unity of human cognition? The widely popular ‘gesture-first’ theory, according to which language began as pure gesture without speech, fails this test. In fact, it fails it twice, predicting what did not evolve (that speech supplanted gesture) and not predicting what did evolve (our own speech-gesture unity). An alternative, which McNeill calls ‘Mead's Loop’ after the philosopher George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
, explains this unity. It too claims that gesture was essential to the origin of language, but not because it was ‘primitive’ or more accessible. Rather, it says that speech could not have evolved without gesture; neither could gesture have evolved without speech. Speech and gesture originated together, at the same time, in response to the same selection pressures.
Mirror neuron ‘twist’
G. H. Mead said that a gesture is significant when it arouses in the person making it the same response it arouses in others (which explains why gestures occur face-to-face and over the phone but not to a tape recorder). According to Mead's Loop, mirror neurons underwent a ‘twist’ whereby they came to respond to one’s own gestures as if they came from someone else: this is what evolved. The ‘twist’ works because it brings the significance of one’s own gestures into the same areas of the brain where speech is being orchestrated. Gesture imagery co-opts the orchestration of speech. The result is units of speech and gesture as the GP envisions. Uniquely in the animal kingdom, gestures came to orchestrate movements of the vocal tract, transforming the ‘vegetative’ system of eating and breathing into an organ of speaking. According to Mead's Loop, this role of imagery in speech orchestration is a major reason why we gesture as we speak.Natural selection
Mead’s Loop and the mirror neuron ‘twist’ would be naturally selected in scenarios where sensing one’s own actions as social is advantageous – for example in imparting information to infants, where it gives the adult the sense of being an instructor as opposed to being just a doer with an onlooker, as is the case with chimpanzees. Entire cultural practices of childrearing depend upon this sense. Self-awareness as an agent is necessary for this advantage to take hold. For Mead's Loop to have been selected the adult must be sensitive to her own gestures as social actions.The link between the GP and self-aware agency also appears in children’s language development, which can be linked to the origin of language in a version of the long-dismissed ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ hypothesis of recapitulation theory
Recapitulation theory
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—and often expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a disproven hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages...
. McNeill considers that when something emerges in current-day ontogenesis only at a certain stage of development, the original natural selection of the feature (if there was any) might have taken place in a similar psychological milieu in phylogenesis. This opens a window onto the mindset of the creature in which the Mead's Loop ‘twist’ was evolving. As a mode of reasoning, it exploits the fact that children’s intellectual status is not fixed but changing. Thus, McNeill argues, we look for new states that seem pegged to steps in the ontogenesis of GPs and Mead's Loop underlying them, and consider these steps as possible signals from ancient phylogenesis. Evidence shows that self-aware agency could be such a signal. The GP emerges around age 3 or 4 years, which is also about when children first become aware of themselves as agents, since before that age the speech and gestures of children have “…the character of ‘sharing’ experiences with the other rather than of ‘communicating’ messages to the Other”, as put by Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan in their 1963 book, Symbol Formation. The theory of mind
Theory of mind
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own...
(which is really awareness of other perspectives) also emerges about this time, and likewise depends on self-aware agency.
Reception
Professor McNeill's books have received coverage in a number of academic journals and in the general press.A 1991 article in the Chicago Reader; a 2006 article in the Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
, Mind
Scientific American Mind
Scientific American Mind is a bimonthly American popular science magazine concentrated on psychology, neuroscience, and related fields. By analyzing and revealing new thinking in the cognitive sciences, the magazine tries to focus on the biggest breakthroughs in these fields...
magazine; and a 2008 article in Boston Globe describe McNeill's work on the language of gesture in detail.
The Acquisition of Language was reviewed in the International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders in 1971.
The Conceptual Basis of Language was reviewed in The Conceptual Basis of Language in 1980.
Hand and Mind was reviewed in Language and Speech; the American Journal of Psychology
American Journal of Psychology
The American Journal of Psychology was the first English-language journal devoted primarily to experimental psychology . AJP was founded by the Johns Hopkins University psychologist Granville Stanley Hall in 1887...
; and Language
Language (journal)
Language is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics...
in 1994.
Gesture and Thought was reviewed in Language in Society and Metaphor and Symbol in 2007.
External links
- McNeill Lab: Center for Gesture and Speech Research at the University of Chicago