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Gestures May Reveal Innate Linguistic Structure

An English speaker kicks a ball, but a Turkish speaker ball kicks--at least if you're following the grammatical order of his or her language. However, a new study shows that without words, speakers of these two language order things in the same way.

Researchers at the University of Chicago studied 40 speakers: 10 each of English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Turkish. These individuals watched videos of simple action sequences, then described them first in words, then in actions.

When they described the actions in words, speakers put the subject, verb and object of the sequences in the order dictated by their respective languages. For example, English speakers followed the order subject, verb, object ("Woman turns knob"), while Turkish speakers followed the order subject, object, verb.

For the next step, participants acted out the scene using physical gestures. Researchers expected the motions to follow the same order as a participant's verbal description. However, all subjects tended to physically illustrate the events in a subject-object-verb order, even if their verbal description followed a subject-verb-object order. A second experiment found similar results when participants illustrated the actions using transparencies.

These findings suggest that we comprehend events via a universal "grammar" independent of language.

Researchers also cite studies on a nomadic deaf community that spontaneously developed its own sign language supports this finding. Their sign language too follows the subject-object-verb construction.

ABSTRACT:
The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally