Barbara J. King | Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary
This chapter examines how gestures of the great apes are created from instrumental actions. Ape gestures are generally believed to form through phylogenetic or ontogenetic ritualization, or – at least in humans – “iconic” gestures are created spontaneously during online interaction. These alternatives are evaluated with respect to data on the tactile pushes used by a mother gorilla to direct her infant around their enclosure. Analysis shows that the pushes exhibit variability in form and force in ways that are tuned to the present physical and social context, indicating the underlying activation of afforded instrumental actions and thus iconic processes in the creation of these gestures, opposed to ritualization. We discuss how this variability reveals continuity between gesture and action that is compatible with recent simulation-based accounts of iconic gesture.
2024. Forms, Mechanisms, and Roles of Iconicity in Spoken Language: A Review. Psychological Reports
Graham, Kirsty E., Federico Rossano & Richard T. Moore
2024. The origin of great ape gestural forms. Biological Reviews
Prieur, Jacques, Katja Liebal & Simone Pika
2024. Social negotiation and “accents” in Western lowland gorillas’ gestural communication. Scientific Reports 14:1
Holler, Judith
2022. Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:1859
2020. Is Conceptual Diversity an Advantage for Scientific Inquiry? A Case Study on the Concept of ‘Gesture’ in Comparative Psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 54:4 ► pp. 805 ff.
Fröhlich, Marlen & Carel P. van Schaik
2020. Must all signals be evolved? A proposal for a new classification of communicative acts. WIREs Cognitive Science 11:4
Prieur, Jacques, Stéphanie Barbu, Catherine Blois‐Heulin & Alban Lemasson
2020. The origins of gestures and language: history, current advances and proposed theories. Biological Reviews 95:3 ► pp. 531 ff.
Bard, Kim A., Vanessa Maguire-Herring, Masaki Tomonaga & Tetsuro Matsuzawa
2019. The gesture ‘Touch’: Does meaning-making develop in chimpanzees’ use of a very flexible gesture?. Animal Cognition 22:4 ► pp. 535 ff.
Fröhlich, Marlen, Christine Sievers, Simon W. Townsend, Thibaud Gruber & Carel P. van Schaik
2019. Multimodal communication and language origins: integrating gestures and vocalizations. Biological Reviews 94:5 ► pp. 1809 ff.
Knox, Andrea, Joey Markx, Emma How, Abdul Azis, Catherine Hobaiter, Frank J. F. van Veen & Helen Morrogh-Bernard
2019. Gesture Use in Communication between Mothers and Offspring in Wild Orang-Utans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) from the Sabangau Peat-Swamp Forest, Borneo. International Journal of Primatology 40:3 ► pp. 393 ff.
2016. Should I stay or should I go? Initiation of joint travel in mother–infant dyads of two chimpanzee communities in the wild. Animal Cognition 19:3 ► pp. 483 ff.
Arbib, Michael, Varsha Ganesh & Brad Gasser
2014. Dyadic brain modelling, mirror systems and the ontogenetic ritualization of ape gesture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369:1644 ► pp. 20130414 ff.
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