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Hands Shaping Communication: From Gestures to Signs

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The Hand

Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 38))

Abstract

The focus of this contribution is on the importance of handshapes and is based on data from several studies coming from different perspectives and research traditions. First, we will analyse the emergence of handshapes in infant prehension and fine motor development. Then, we will consider how and to what extent handshapes have played a relevant role in research on gestures in children. Finally, we will describe different trends in the linguistic analyses of handshapes in child and adult uses of sign languages. Bringing these perspectives together for the first time in a single paper provides a better general understanding of the relevant role of the human hand in shaping communication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The hand is commonly divided into different areas that take their names from the nerves that innervate them: radial, median and ulnar. See also Fig. 2 for an approximate mapping of these areas. Proximal areas are areas closer to the palm, while distal areas are closer to the digits.

  2. 2.

    The concept of “affordance” was initially introduced by Gibson (1979) to indicate invariant features in the environment that offer themselves to an organism supporting or “affording” perceptual or sensory-motor exploitation. For example, a mug may have multiple affordances with a handle that supports grasping and a hollow part that allows carrying liquids.

  3. 3.

    Speech Acts Theory was initially formulated by the philosopher John Austin in a famous series of lectures collected in How to Do things with Words (Austin 1962). Austin showed how, in the pragmatics of communication, sentences can be analysed not only in terms of information conveyed, but as bringing forth three types of actions: the act of saying something (i.e. the locutionary act); what one wishes to communicate in saying it (i.e. the illocutionary act); what causal consequences one wishes to bring about by saying it (i.e. the perlocutionary act). This distinction was later taken up and extended by John Searle who suggested that every statement can be analysed according to its propositional content (i.e. locutionary act) and performative content (i.e. illocutionary act) (Searle 1969; see also Sparaci 2010 for a short review of the relation between Austin’s theory and Bruner’s work).

  4. 4.

    Full-blown pointing is usually defined as a gesture in which “the index finger and arm are extended in the direction of the interesting object, whereas the remaining fingers are curled under the hand, with the thumb held down and to the side” (Butterworth 2003, p. 9).

  5. 5.

    The McArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) are parent questionnaires assessing action and gesture production, word comprehension, word production and early grammatical development between 8- and 36-months (Fenson et al. 2007). They are valid and reliable measures that have been adapted to a number of languages and cultures other than English and used across the world in children with both typical and atypical development. Further information may be fond on the following website: http://mb-cdi.stanford.edu/index.html.

  6. 6.

    For a full description of representational techniques see also Marentette et al. 2016.

  7. 7.

    In the present chapter, all gestures and signs will be reported in capital letters extending to gestures a convention usually employed in sign language studies for signs.

  8. 8.

    All handshapes presented in this paper are represented using the annotation system described in Eccarius and Brentari 2008.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter is a part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 660468 to LS. Portions of this work were inspired by thought provoking topics discussed during the ABLE Workshop “From Tools and Gestures to the Language-Ready Brain”, Atlanta, GA, April 2010. Authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on a previous version of this chapter.

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  1. Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London (UCL), London, UK

    Laura Sparaci

  2. Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC), National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Rome, Italy

    Laura Sparaci & Virginia Volterra

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Correspondence to Laura Sparaci .

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  1. Institute of Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Practice, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Marta Bertolaso

  2. Institute of Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Practice, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Nicola Di Stefano

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Sparaci, L., Volterra, V. (2017). Hands Shaping Communication: From Gestures to Signs. In: Bertolaso, M., Di Stefano, N. (eds) The Hand. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66881-9_3

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