Why is it harder to talk if we don’t gesture? Why do we still move our hands if we’re talking on the phone but the other person can’t see us? Such questions are tackled in the new book Gesture: A Slim Guide (Bookshop|Amazon), a sort of survey course of the state of gesture studies. The author, linguist Lauren Gawne of Latrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, is also cohost, along with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, of the Lingthusiasm podcast, an entertaining, informative show that all about, as they put it, “what’s neat about linguistics.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Do We Gesture When Talking, Even When Nobody Else Can See Us?”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
And we were talking earlier in the show about the book Gesture by linguist Lauren Gaughan. That’s G-A-W-N-E. She’s a senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. And this book is sort of like a survey course of gesture studies. And it tries to answer such questions as, why is it harder to talk if we don’t gesture? Why do we still gesture if we’re talking on the phone and the other person can’t see us? And does moving our hands somehow help us find the right word when we’re trying to express ourselves?
The study of gestures is actually relatively new. It took a big step forward in the 1940s when there was high-quality affordable video, which offered a huge improvement over efforts to analyze gestures based on still photos. And in one of those early studies, a researcher filmed conversations with Italian and Eastern European immigrants to the United States. And studying those films, he could see differences in the ways that the two communities gestured.
But you’ll love this, Grant. What he also found was in the next generation of these immigrant families, those differences in gesturing were less noticeable or gone altogether, suggesting that gesture is learned at least some extent from the culture around us. That is so fascinating and definitely conforms to what I know. With language itself, the spoken word by the second or third generation does tend to homogenize to the dominant local culture.
There’s all kinds of great stuff in this book. One of the other things I really enjoyed was that Lauren Gahn notes that as soon as someone realizes that their gestures are being observed, they get self-conscious. And so that led to some pretty funny studies that tried to get around that problem. Because in one of them, subjects were asked to rest their arms on a surface that supposedly contained electrodes. And these electrodes were attached to these long cables that stretched into the next room. Well, it turns out the electrodes were fake, but the subjects refrained from gesturing while telling stories. And in another study like this, participants had their legs, arms, and feet and heads strapped to these supposedly fancy chairs because they were told that the chairs were being tested for their ergonomic qualities. But instead, they were trying to diminish the number and kind of gestures.
Exactly. Exactly. And Grant, once you start thinking about this stuff, it’s really hard to stop. I’m looking at myself and other people now and thinking a whole lot more about the gestures we use. It is a fascinating book. I have yet to finish it, but the book Gesture, G-E-S-T-U-R-E, by Lauren Gawne, G-A-W-N-E, is worth checking out. You can find a link on our website.
And I must say, the most striking thing about the book is this isn’t one of your throwaway body language for business people types of books. No. This is the real deal. And I also wanted to mention that Lauren is co-host with Gretchen McCulloch of a fascinating and lovely and just wonderful linguistics podcast called Lingthusiasm. And we’ll link to that as well.
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