ATLANTA — Even though there are thousands of languages spoken throughout the world, a new study reveals a nonverbal, universal system of communication exists. Georgia State University researchers uncovered insights into how our native language shapes the way we communicate through gestures from a young age.
Study author Şeyda Özçalışkan, a psychology professor at Georgia State, has been exploring the intricate link between language and thought for years. Her latest research extends her previous investigations into adults, focusing now on children between three and 12, who are either native English or Turkish speakers.
The choice of English and Turkish for the study was crucial.
“English and Turkish were the primary comparisons because they differ in terms of the way you talk about events,” says Özçalışkan, a native Turkish speaker herself, in a university release.
“If you’re speaking Turkish, if you want to describe someone running into a house, you have to chunk it up. You say, ‘He’s running and then he enters the house.’ But if it’s in English, they’ll just say, ‘He ran into the house,’ all in one compact sentence. As such, it is easier to express both running (manner of motion) and entering (path of motion) together in a single expression in English than in Turkish. We wanted to find out whether gesture does or does not follow these differences and how early do children learn these patterns.”
The study involved children using their hands to act out specific actions, like running into a house, both with speech (co-speech gesture) and without speech (silent gesture). The findings were revealing. When children used gestures along with speech, their gestures mirrored the linguistic patterns of their native language. However, when using only silent gestures, the differences between Turkish and English speakers diminished significantly.
“It is easier to express both running and entering in a single gesture compared to speech, particularly for Turkish speakers who have to express running and entering in two separate sentences in their speech,” notes Özçalışkan. “So when you’re not speaking, gesture doesn’t have to follow the separation of manner and path, and, you can easily actually put them together.”
These language-specific patterns in gesture emerge early in life, with children as young as three or four beginning to show these patterns in their co-speech gestures.
The research also included studies on sighted and blind adults, both English and Turkish speakers, using similar methods. The results were consistent with those found in children, showing differences in co-speech gestures but similarities in silent gestures, even among participants who were blind from birth and had never witnessed gesturing.
Many of the gestures observed in the study resembled “home sign systems,” which are spontaneous sign languages developed by deaf children without exposure to conventional sign languages. This similarity points to a potential universal gesture system that transcends language, hearing ability, or sightedness, enabling broader communication.
The next phase of this research, as Özçalışkan indicates, will involve studying blind Turkish and English-speaking children to determine if these patterns manifest early in life, just as they do in sighted children and adults.
“We established in our earlier work that blind adults gesture like sighted adults… They showed differences in speech and co-speech gesture, but when they’re not talking, they show similarities. So, the next question is, how early do we see evidence of that?” says Özçalışkan.
The study is published in the journal Language and Cognition.
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