
Blind speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts: study (2016) - rhyzomatic
https://www.superlinguo.com/post/149950073272/blind-people-gesture-and-why-thats-kind-of-a-big
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ardit33
1\. We are born with the ability to gesture, and not something that is learned
directly. So it is a in-born trait. You get the ability of speech, and
gesturing tags along. (but most likely, evolutionary speaking, gesturing came
first).

2\. Gesturing is linked to speech/language. Different languages will have
different gestures, not because they learned them, but by the grammatical
structure/intonation of the language.

It will have been interesting to see multi-lingual people, and see if the
level of gesturing changes when they switch language.

"The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted
counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured
significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of
sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something
that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not
something that we learn from looking at other speakers."

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NoodleIncident
I wonder what it is about Italian that leads to the stereotype, then?

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ardit33
It is not just Italians, but latin based languages (Spanish, French) are also
known to use more gestures, while Germanic ones, a lot less... eg. German,
Swedish folks almost come out as 'robotic' compared to Mediterranean
countries.

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irrational
I speak English and Spanish and I have almost no hand gestures. But I see
other English speakers that are mono-lingual and they have extensive hand
gestures. I wonder what is up with that?

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jrockway
I went to high school in Japan for a year. Something that tripped me up for a
while is the gesture for "come here". It's equivalent to the English gesture
for "go away". (Try gesturing "go away" like you're shooing a bug away and
"come here" like you want to tell someone a secret. Your hand flips 180
degrees, but it's basically the same gesture.)

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keanebean86
My Indian coworkers shake their head side to side for yes and no. When I first
starting working with them I was always a little mad that they never agreed
with me until I realized what was going on.

You can tell if it's yes or no depending on speed but thanks to covid WFH for
months I've forgotten which is which. Going back to the office is going to be
an adjustment.

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taneq
There are something like four distinct head-waggle motions with different
meanings.

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bryanrasmussen
It would be interesting to know if there is any difference in the types of
gestures employed [https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/a-primer-on-
communica...](https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/a-primer-on-
communication-studies/s04-02-types-of-nonverbal-communicati.html)

[http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_languag...](http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_language/gesture_type.htm)

I tend to use metaphoric gestures a lot by splitting complicated subjects up
into groups, and then using gestures to illustrate the group I am discussing
at the moment.

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082349872349872
I've read that in ASL, one may establish a "pronoun" by signing in a location,
and then using that location as an endpoint for further signs. Is this true?

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bryanrasmussen
yes
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002438411...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024384113002167)

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BurningFrog
I'd love a study comparing Chimpanzee gestures to humans.

I'd expect similarities!

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totetsu
One think I noted is that as eye contact, and therefore line of sight is not
so important for blind speakers, They tend to be more expressive with their
head movements.

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dang
Url changed from [https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/150001033323/blind-
peop...](https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/150001033323/blind-people-
gesture-and-why-thats-kind-of-a-big), which points to this.

A related article is [https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/blind-people-gesture-
like-sig...](https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/blind-people-gesture-like-sighted-
people.html)

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rhyzomatic
Thank you dang, I originally read the first link on my phone and didn't notice
that it was quoting another blog.

