Whether it’s giving someone an “OK” sign, pointing something out with an index finger or giving someone the middle finger, people may rely on hand and body gestures to express their thoughts more than they are aware of.
“You only have to go as far as Italy to see that modern language is both gestural and vocal,” said Michael Corballis, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Indeed, anyone who has experienced the Italian culture can attest to the importance of gestures in communication.
Tyler Rasmussen, who is part Italian and graduated from UCLA last year with a degree in political science, studied abroad in Italy while in college and admits that “basically everything in Italian has some form of hand signal that goes along with it.”
Corballis has even proposed in a recent publication that hand gestures may have evolved as the first form of language in human ancestors.
“Over time, speech has slowly taken a more prominent role in language … yet gestures are interwoven with speech all the time and sometimes replace it,” he said.
For example, simply raising your eyebrows can let someone know that you have a question, and giving directions to someone without moving your hands would be pretty difficult.
“We often don’t notice it, but people are gesturing all the time when they speak,” Corballis said.
In fact, people are good enough at quickly producing and interpreting hand movements that people who are deaf can rely entirely on their hands to communicate with the same sophistication that hearing people can with spoken language, Corballis said.
Sign languages, which are often used by the deaf and those who are hard of hearing, are much different than simple gestures though.
“Sign languages, like any other language, can express (complex abstract information) … whereas with gestures there is only a limited amount of information that you can carry,” said Robert Bayley, a professor of linguistics at UC Davis.
Others in the field agree that communicating with your hands is no different than communicating with your mouth.
“In my experience, I have never seen any limitations to communicating with sign language (as opposed to a spoken language),” said Roni Perluti, a professor of American Sign Language at Santa Monica College.
“One of the advantages (of talking in sign language) is that you can talk with your mouth full or when it’s really noisy,” Perluti added.
The fact that sign languages can be and are widely used as an alternative for people who can’t use spoken languages suggests that gesturing is still very involved in the ways that we communicate, Corballis said.
The different types and meanings of gestures that people use are also specific to different cultures, Bayley said.
“People gesture in different ways and to different degrees in cultures. … Obviously the meaning of gestures differ from culture to culture,” he said.
Corballis, a native of New Zealand, said that joining your index finger and thumb in a way similar to the sign for fantastic in America and shaking your hand is the same as exclaiming “yes!” or “we got it!”
In America, where we prefer a simple thumbs up, such a gesture would be meaningless.
Understanding exactly how gestures and our interpretations of them can contribute to communication continues to be researched.
“There are probably all sorts of uncharted ways that gestures are involved in and influencing conversations,” Corballis said.