David WilkinsI would like to focus the discussion on two general questions:
Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, V.A. Northern California Health Care System
'Pointing' provides a useful starting point for such a discussion for a couple of reasons. First, most cultures combine some form of pointing gesture with spatial language to form gesture-speech composite signals. Still, we know very little about how uniform or variable such 'composites' are cross-linguistically. (What is the relation between the information contributed by the gesture, compared to the information provided in speech?). Second, pointing with the index finger has long been identified by many researchers as a gestural universal, reflecting innate predispositions. Is this really the case?
My research with Arrernte-speaking communities in Central Australia suggests a real need to re-examine what such a claim would actually mean. My own experience is that, as part of learning to speak Arrernte, I also had to (re-)learn how to point (and gesture) properly. I could no longer use my index-finger point in ways that seemed natural to me, even though 'index finger' pointing is ubiquitous in the culture. In my presentation, I will use video to demonstrate some key cross-cultural differences in pointing behavior.