Gestures, Words and Thoughts.
When Warner Brothers released the seven-minute cartoon Canary Row in 1950, it’s a good bet no one realized they’d created an important tool in the study of human communication and cognition.
Since about 1980, Canary Row has taken on a second life in David McNeill’s University of Chicago psycholinguistics laboratory. McNeill and a succession of graduate students have used it to study how and why people gesture as they talk, to tease out the hidden mental processes behind speech and gesture, and ultimately to question the popular model of the human mind as nothing more than a very complex computer.
McNeill has found that the gestures we spontaneously make in conversation are full of meaning. They are not “body language,” unconnected with speech. They are not ethnic hangovers. They are not emotional outlets for overexcited storytellers. They are not a crutch for the inarticulate—nor a simple translation of the spoken word. McNeill contends that gestures and speech jointly form a single mode of expression stemming from the same underlying mental process. Together they are windows on the mind.
