title: Creating a communication system from scratch: gesture beats vocalization hands down.
abstract: How does modality affect people's ability to create a communication system from scratch? The present study experimentally tests this question by having pairs of participants communicate a range of pre-specified items (emotions, actions, objects) over a series of trials to a partner using either non-linguistic vocalization, gesture or a combination of the two. Gesture-alone outperformed vocalization-alone, both in terms of successful communication and in terms of the creation of an inventory of sign-meaning mappings shared within a dyad (i.e., sign alignment). Combining vocalization with gesture did not improve performance beyond gesture-alone. In fact, for action items, gesture-alone was a more successful means of communication than the combined modalities. When people do not share a system for communication they can quickly create one, and gesture is the best means of doing so.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia.
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fay
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia.
authors.forename: Casey J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Lister
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia.
authors.forename: T Mark
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Ellison
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goldin-Meadow
keywords: alignment; embodiment; gesture; language origin; multimodal; signs; vocalization