Evidence Suggests, Humans Share a Universal , Non-Verbal Language.
New research suggests that humans share
an innate non-verbal communication system that
emerges when people gesture without talking.
ScienceAlert reports that researchers studied the
gestures of adults and children in an attempt to
understand how language impacts the way people think.
The research also aimed to determine how
humans construct and express ideas, which can
be seen when they gesture without speaking.
In addition to gestures, this universal system of non-verbal
communication includes body language, eye contact
and facial expressions, all of which indicate how a person is feeling.
The researchers from Georgia State University (GSU)
in Atlanta found that language begins influencing
nonverbal representations of events at an early age. .
The team was led by Şeyda Özçalışkan, a psychological scientist
at GSU who studies language development across different
types of learners and different language speakers.
In the team's latest study, 100 children were asked
to describe an action first verbally along with
hand gestures, and then again without speaking. .
Half of the children were native English speakers,
while the other half were native Turkish speakers. .
The researchers looked to determine if the children's
native language impacted the order in which
they chose to express an idea with gestures. .
The differences observed between the two
groups reportedly disappeared when asked
to describe something without speaking.
The team's findings were published
in the journal 'Language and Cognition.'