Content deleted Content added
Line 122:
The linkage of hand and body gestures in conjunction with speech is further revealed by the nature of gesture use in blind individuals during conversation. This phenomenon uncovers a function of gesture that goes beyond portraying communicative content of language and extends [[David McNeill]]'s view of the gesture-speech system. This suggests that gesture and speech work tightly together, and a disruption of one (speech or gesture) will cause a problem in the other. Studies have found strong evidence that speech and gesture are innately linked in the brain and work in an efficiently wired and choreographed system. McNeill's view of this linkage in the brain is just one of three currently up for debate; the others declaring gesture to be a "support system" of spoken language or a physical mechanism for lexical retrieval.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Iverson |first=Jana M. |author2=Esther Thelen |title=Hand, Mouth and Brain |journal=Journal of Consciousness Studies |year=2005 |url=http://cspeech.ucd.ie/~fred/docs/IversonThelen.pdf |access-date=1 October 2013 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004215359/http://cspeech.ucd.ie/~fred/docs/IversonThelen.pdf |archive-date=4 October 2013 }}</ref>
Because of this connection of co-speech gestures—a form of manual action—in language in the brain, Roel Willems and Peter Hagoort conclude that both gestures and language contribute to the understanding and decoding of a speaker's encoded message. Willems and Hagoort's research suggest that "processing evoked by gestures is qualitatively similar to that of words at the level of semantic processing." This conclusion is supported through findings from experiments by Skipper where the use of gestures led to "a division of labor between areas related to language or action (Broca's area and premotor/primary motor cortex respectively)", The use of gestures in combination with speech allowed the brain to decrease the need for "semantic control"
Although there is an obvious connection in the aid of gestures in understanding a message, "the understanding of gestures is not the same as understanding spoken language." These two functions work together and gestures help facilitate understanding, but they only "partly drive the neural language system".<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Willems | first1 = Roel M. | last2 = Hagoort | first2 = Peter | year = 2007 | title = Neural Evidence for the Interplay between Language, Gesture, and Action: A Review | journal = Brain and Language | volume = 101 | issue = 3| pages = 14–6 | doi=10.1016/j.bandl.2007.03.004| pmid = 17416411 | hdl = 11858/00-001M-0000-0013-198D-E | s2cid = 14874308 | hdl-access = free }}</ref>
|