Dive into the fascinating world of gestures, a universal element of communication across all languages. Explore quirky research methods, like a special chair used to study spontaneous gestures without revealing the trick. Discover the interplay between spoken and signed languages and how personal experiences in learning ASL can alter one's gestures. Plus, enjoy insights from Lauren’s new book that aims to make gesture research accessible to everyone, blending humor with deep linguistic reflections.
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insights INSIGHT
Gestures Benefit Speaker and Listener
People gesture less and with less informative gestures when the listener is not present or can't see them.
Gesture serves both cognitive and communicative purposes, being partly unavoidable even without an audience.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Deceptive Methods to Stop Gestures
Gesture researchers use clever deception methods to prevent participants from gesturing without telling them explicitly.
Examples include electrode chairs and table-mounted buttons to physically restrain hand movements.
insights INSIGHT
Gestures Signal Word Searching
Preventing gestures makes speech less fluent, increasing disfluencies like ums and ahs.
Gestures signal to listeners that speakers are searching for words, acting as communication aids rather than purely cognitive tools.
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Lauren Gawne's "Gesture: A Slim Guide" offers a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the field of gesture studies. The book explores the cognitive and communicative functions of gestures, examining research on how gestures are used in various contexts, including spoken and signed languages. It delves into the fascinating methodologies employed by gesture researchers, highlighting both innovative and sometimes unconventional experimental designs. Furthermore, the book examines the interplay between gesture and language, demonstrating how these modalities work together to create richer communication. Finally, it touches upon the future of gesture studies and its implications for various fields, including human-computer interaction.
Because Internet
Understanding the New Rules of Language
Gretchen McCulloch
In 'Because Internet,' Gretchen McCulloch delves into the ways the internet has influenced language, from the development of texting and memes to the use of emojis and emoticons. The book examines how internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, and how social media acts as a laboratory for unedited and unfiltered language. McCulloch discusses how our online interactions reveal aspects of our identities and how language evolves quickly through online communities. She also explores the historical context of internet language, including the different generations of internet users and their unique linguistic styles[2][3][5].
Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out "coloured garden relax chair" that makes people "um" more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen's gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).
There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn't fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We'll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you'd like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://episodes.fm/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjA4MDgzMjc2MA
Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/781132632536793088/transcript-episode-103-a-slim-guide-to-a-slim
Announcements:
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This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation...stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who's a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.
We're also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn't cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky's assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we've read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.
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For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/781132385944322048/103-a-hand-y-guide-to-gesture
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