David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an “imagery-language dialectic” that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. In _Gesture and Thought,_ the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of (...) twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought. _Gesture and Thought _is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought. (shrink)

A seminal 1921 work by the linguist Edward Sapir, outlining his influential ideas and hypotheses on language and its speakers.

This book reexamines ideas about linguistic relativity in the light of new evidence and changes in theoretical climate.

In Gesture and Thought he brings together years of this research, arguing that gesturing, an act which has been popularly understood as an accessory to speech, ...

INTRODUCTION The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be described as that of a businessman of specialized talents— one of those individuals ...

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.