30: Why do we gesture when we talk?

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2019

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is also available as a special video episode so you can see the gestures! Go to youtube.com/lingthusiasm or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8dHtr7uLHs to watch it! When you describe to someone a ball bouncing down a hill, one of the easiest ways to make it really clear just how much the ball bounced would be to gesture the way that it made its way downwards. You might even do the gesture even if you’re talking to the other person on the telephone and they can’t see you. No matter what language you speak, you’re likely to gesture, but that doesn’t mean we all gesture the same. In Lingthusiasm’s very first video episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about gesture in a format where you can actually see what gestures we’re talking about! In particular, we talk about the kinds of gestures that we make at the same time as our words, even when no one can see us (Ever gesture on the phone? You’re not alone!) These gestures, called co-speech gestures, let us reinforce the rhythm of what we’re saying and indicate where or how something is moving. We also talk about how kids learn to gesture as they’re learning to speak, and how gestures differ in different languages. Massive thank you to our patrons for making this special video episode possible! Producing video is not a trivial task for a production team that’s used to audio-only, and your support on Patreon directly enabled us to film, edit, and caption this video, so everyone gets to learn about gesture linguistics without the frustration of not actually seeing what gestures we’re talking about! You’re stellar human beings and we appreciate you greatly. If you’d like to help Lingthusiasm keep producing regular ad-free episodes and cool additional features like this gesture video, become one of our patrons on Patreon. Plus, if you pledge $5 or more per month, you also get access to a monthly bonus episode and our entire archive of 25 bonus episodes right now. That’s so much Lingthusiasm you don’t wanna miss out on! The latest Patreon bonus episode asks, do you adjust the way you talk depending on who you’re talking to? There’s a word for that: linguistic accommodation. In Bonus 25, Gretchen talks with our producer Claire Gawne (yes, she’s Lauren’s sister) about how they’ve shifted their accents between Melbourne, Montreal, and Edinburgh. Plus, some behind-the-scenes on how Lingthusiasm gets made. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to listen to it! patreon.com/lingthusiasm For more information and all the links mentioned in this episode, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/183615937296/lingthusiasm-episode-30-why-do-we-gesture-when-we

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiast, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:18.0	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:19.0	And I'm Lauren Gorn. And in today's episode,
0:21.6	we're getting enthusiastic about the gestures that we make when we speak. But first,
0:26.6	welcome to our first video episode. Video!
0:29.6	Very exciting. Thanks to our patrons, we reached a funding goal where we were able to
0:35.6	pay for the extra production costs to have a video.
0:39.9	And of course, as soon as we decided that, I couldn't help but hope that we would do a gesture
0:44.0	episode. And so that is our first video episode. So you can see the gestures. This is also being
0:50.1	released as an audio episode in the normal feed. So if you're hearing this, you can listen
0:55.6	to it audio only, but you will miss some of the gestures so you can go to YouTube.com
1:01.0	slash Lenthusiasm to see the full gestory version. And now, gestures, Lauren, they're really cool. You've done proper research on these.
1:21.5	I have, yes. How did you get into gestures? I did a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate, and like many people kind of found linguistics in my first year of of doing an undergraduate degree and thought this subject is so cool that I was still doing it and I was majoring in it by the end of my third year.
1:40.3	And in the last semester of third year, I thought linguistics was cool,
1:45.0	but I really thought that I wanted to do further study in art history. And then in the final
1:51.5	class, the final semester, I took a subject called Language and Culture with Barb
1:56.3	Kelly, who I blame a lot of my interests. A lot of my interests on and one week of this class on
2:05.8	language and culture was about this topic of gesture studies that she'd done some work in and by time
2:12.3	you get to third year of linguistics you kind of know about sounds and phonetics and syntax and sentence structure and you think you kind of know it all yeah and you kind of know about sounds and phonetics and sentence structure. And you think
2:20.0	you kind of know it all. Yeah. And you kind of, you especially think you know it all by the end of 30.
2:24.3	And that completely changes the more that you study and the likes you realize you knew and
2:29.0	and learning about gesture was one of those moments where I was just like there's this whole
	...

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