What’s communication got to do with it? Gesture in children blind from birth

It is widely accepted that gesture can serve a communicative function. The purpose of this study was to explore gesture use in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen gesture and have no experience with its communicative function. Four children blind from birth were tested in 3 discourse situations (narrative, reasoning, and spatial directions) and compared with groups of sighted and blindfolded sighted children. Blind children produced gestures, although not in all of the contexts in which sighted children gestured, and the gestures they produced resembled those of sighted children in both form and content. Results uggest that gesture may serve a function for the speaker that is independent of its impact on the listener. When people talk, they gesture. With movements of their hands, speakers indicate size, shape, direction, and distance, lend emphasis to particular words, and highlight essential phrases. Gestures have been observed in children before they can talk (e.g., Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988; Bates, 1976) and in speakers from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds ( ee Feyer-eisen & de Lannoy, 1991). Because gesture is less codified than speech and has the potential to convey information imagistically (McNeill, 1992), meanings not easily encoded into speech can be conveyed in the accompanying gestural stream. As a result, gesture can convey information that is not explicitly encoded in speech, thus providing a unique window into the mind o