The document summarizes research on whether gestures are universal or language-specific. It describes studies finding differences in gestures between languages and how gestures influence language acquisition. The presented study showed subjects videos of speakers of different languages with faces covered and had them identify if the speakers were speaking English. Subjects were mostly able to identify non-English speakers by their gestures. The study concluded gestures may be specific to languages and there is a perception of what English gestures look like.

1. Gestures:
Universal or Not?

2. Background Data
 There have been many studies documenting the differences
in gestures between languages.
 The same gesture can have different meanings in different
languages.
 Also, the same concept can have different gestures across
languages.

3. Previous Research
 By having native English and native Spanish speakers describe
the same cartoon, McNeill found that the English speakers
used more path descriptions accompanied by segmented and
extreme gestures whereas Spanish speakers used more
manner terms, less segmented and less extreme gestures.

4. More Research
 One observation that has been studied extensively is the
difference between Italian and American gestures. Iverson et.
Al. found that these differences influence language
acquisition such that Italian children enter the two-word
stage later than American children.

5. A bit more research
 Lastly, a study by Maynard found that Japanese speakers nod
3 times as often in conversations. They nod at different parts
in the sentence and possibly for different reasons.

6. Hypothesis
Gestures can be used to inform the listener about the speaker.
If gestures are specific to a language then English speakers will
be able to identify other English speakers by their gestures.

7. Methods
 Showed subjects 6 YouTube videos featuring speakers of
different languages.
 The clips had 10 – 30 seconds straight of gesturing that
would allow us to cover the speaker’s faces
 Then we asked them the following questions:

8. Survey questions
 What is your native language?
 Do you speak any other languages?
 What gender are you?
 Are these people speaking English or not? Why?

9. Results
 Overall, the subjects were good at figuring out which
speakers were not speaking English
 More Asians knew that the Asian videos were not English
than any other ethnicity
 More people thought that French was English than British
English
 Most people thought the American in the Italian setting was
not speaking English

10. Results con’t.
 The subjects gave many reasons for why they chose English
or non-English. Among the most common were:
 The speaker’s gestures reminded them of someone they knew
 Background
 Hand and arm movements (gestures)

11. Criteria for hand and arm movements
 Most of the no answers were because the gestures were too
quick or too much.
 Most of the yes answers said that English gesturing is more
informal, slower, calmer and smaller.
 Different subjects used the same criteria to draw different
conclusions

12. Problems
 Did not counterbalance e.g. did not show videos in different
orders.
 Didn’t control for setting e.g. different clothes, backgrounds
etc.
 We didn’t specify which dialect of English we were asking
about.

13. Conclusion
 Even though the subjects were not able to identify English
speakers by their gestures they were able to identify non-
English speakers by their gestures.
 Our most interesting finding was that there is a prevalent
perception of what English gestures look like.