Every person wants to be understood by others. Now, a study by US researchers indicates that the multiplicity of the world’s languages is not necessarily an obstacle here. That is, the body language spoken by people can be understood regardless of their native language.
Psychologist Seyda Özcaliskan of Georgia State University and her colleagues are interested in human gestures. Specifically, they want to better understand how people think, formulate ideas, and express themselves. Thus, a person who cannot express himself in words is observed to use various hand gestures, reports ScienceAlert.
Gestures make up only a small part of nonverbal communication. In the absence of words, a person can also express themselves with body language, posture, eye contact and facial expressions. At the same time, Özcaliskan assumes that gestures can give insight into children’s mental abilities. They can reveal how children formulate and express ideas as they develop.
That’s why his team included a hundred children between the ages of 3 and 12 in a recent study. The children were first asked to describe a certain action using words and hand gestures. The children then had to describe the same action using only their hands.
Half of the children studied spoke English and the other half Turkish as their native language. According to the working group, it is good to compare English and Turkish because people who speak these languages describe events in different ways.
For example, if someone wanted to express the thought “runs into the house” in Turkish, the speaker would have to break up his or her thought. According to Özcaliskan, this person would say “runs and then enters the house”. At the same time, a person expressing himself in English would say a compact sentence: “runs into the house.”
In the study, his working group was interested in knowing whether this peculiarity is also expressed in children’s gestures. The study should also have shown how children acquire the expressive characteristics of their native language early.
How did he get home?
When the children spoke and waved their hands simultaneously during the study, their gestures followed the pattern of their native language. Just as the native Turkish-speaking children verbally described the steps of an action one by one, so they also did the hand movements one by one. However, native English-speaking children combined their gestures into one continuous movement.
According to the working group, the children’s gestures probably reflected the order of the words: the children seemed to act out the situations described during the narration. It also became clear that children acquired the patterns of their native language already at the age of 3-4 years. This suggests that native language can influence a person’s nonverbal self-expression at an early age.
However, when the children were asked to describe the same situation without words, the children’s hand gestures turned out to be much more similar. According to the working group, it was found that the linguistic differences in the children’s gestures had disappeared.
A similar trend was observed by Seyda Özcaliskan and colleagues in one of their first studies with adults. At that time, it was discovered that when blind native speakers of English and Turkish were asked to express themselves without words, they used the same gestures as sighted people.
However, previous studies in German and English-speaking children have shown that unspoken gestures do not necessarily follow the structure of a person’s native language. However, previous studies have not compared speakers of different languages.
According to the authors of the new work, their findings are just the first swallows in their field. However, they do raise the possibility that all of humanity uses some sort of nonverbal communication system by default. When the child begins to learn the native language, this system changes or is overwritten.
At the same time, the authors admit that their study is based only on the interpretation of abstract gestures of about a hundred children and adolescents. Although this does not definitively imply the existence of a universal language, the topic deserves further investigation, according to the working group.
The research was published in the journal Language and Cognition.
2024-01-03 10:45:00
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