Where is language located in the brain? Is the human brain specialized for language? Are there sensitive periods for acquisition? Is any aspect of language innate? Are there learning mechanisms dedicated to language? Wernicke and Broca identified language areas for comprehension and production in the left hemisphere, and modern studies rely on PET, fMRI, and MEG for tracking just where information is processed. It is unclear whether there is a sensitive period for language acquisition. Evidence from brain injuries and feral children is problematic. Evidence from second language learning is rarely comparable in amount of experience, feedback, and practice to first language. As children acquire more language, they process it faster, with greater left-hemisphere specialization. With bilingualism comes greater density in the left hemisphere. Sign languages are also processed in the left hemisphere. But some aspects of language are processed in the right hemisphere. Language is part of a more general system of communication, with affect, facial expression, gesture, and stance, so storage in the brain occurs in both hemispheres.

Children’s first words may bear little resemblance to adult forms (/ga/ for squirrel), and they may at first produce multiple versions of words. Mastering adult pronunciations takes time and practice. Babbling allows practice with some sounds, but those sounds may only appear in words years later. Early vocalizations, at times paired with gestures, often precede recognizable words. And children take time before they can produce versions that match adult productions. Some 70% of children’s words up to age four are inaccurate and variable in form. Children may select some word forms over others in production because they are easier targets. They simplify words by substituting sounds they can manage; they assimilate some sounds to neighboring ones; they omit some sounds, especially in clusters. And they may set up templates for multisyllabic words, focussing on stressed syllables over unstressed ones. As they get older, they make spontaneous repairs to words that don’t match their stored representations, and also repair when asked by others. Finally, they practice words, to themselves, and in their daily language use. Single words are easier than word combinations, so longer utterances take still more practice.

As children add words, they also add more specificity to their utterances, hence more complexity. They start to combine words with gestures, then words with other words. They advance from one word at a time to sequences of words and then combine these under the same intonation contour. The early composition of children’s vocabulary is strongly affected by adult input, and this may determine the proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives available to children early on. Their early constructions are limited in scope, tied to specific lexical items. Conversational exchanges at this stage often depend on adult scaffolding. Children distinguish ‘given’ from ‘new’ information, making use of word order and stress, as well as information from inflections, to identify word classes. Early word combinations in their first constructions are very similar across languages in the meanings expressed. Early combinations may be viewed as frozen forms, as intermediate forms, and as constructed forms, depending on their history in each child’s speech. Children learn to put together new combinations as they talk with adults and so discover more of the options in the language being acquired.

As there are many different methods of linguistic analysis, there are many different ways of approaching gesture analysis. This chapter gives a selective overview of the current state of art on gesture coding and annotation systems. It opens with a discussion on the difference between coding and annotation, before it considers aims and challenges in gesture coding and annotation. Afterward, the chapter reviews existing systems and reflects on the interrelation between subject, research question, coding and annotation system. The chapter emphasizes that coding and annotations systems are always influenced by the particular theoretical framework in which they are situated. Accordingly, similar to the analysis of language, a theory-neutral analysis of gestures is not possible. Rather, theoretical assumptions influence subjects, aspects and levels of analysis and as such also make themselves visible in annotation systems. This will be illustrated by exemplary research topics in gestures studies: language, language development, cognition, interaction, and human–machine interaction. The account of the individual systems thereby does not aim at an extensive discussion, but rather focuses on their general logic for answering their particular research question. Here, differences between systems addressing the same research topic (e.g. language) as well as differences across research topics (e.g. language vs. interaction) will be explored. The chapter closes with some considerations on possible future developments.

One method for teaching creativity is to encourage students to adopt broader perspectives. Taking different perspectives provides access to a wide range of knowledge, including social categories, stereotypes, interactions, roles, and events. Prospective thinking has also proven effective by asking students to judge how probable it would be for various future events to happen to them. Examples of creative methods (cartoon captions, gestures, incongruent contexts, novel uses of parts) and types of thinking (prospective, perspective) can serve as guidelines for instructional interventions when developing curricula for improving creativity. For example, an undergraduate creative thinking course at a large Midwestern university focused on strategies to help students develop different perspectives, identify unique opportunities, generate multiple ideas to solve problems, and evaluate those ideas. One of the themes that emerged from six international studies was the role of the teacher in managing discomfort from the uncertainty of open-ended tasks.

Chapter 4 shows how language has evolved through interaction. The first part focuses on the role that hand gestures, mouth movements, vocal actions, and the interplay of different modalities, together with the development of imitation capabilities, play in the evolution of language. In the second part, I show how language has evolved from interaction among people who progressively converged on the same meanings. I illustrate several new interdisciplinary approaches and methods adopted to study the emergence and evolution of language in dyads, groups, and populations, from agent-based simulations to experimental semiotics to culturomic approaches. Finally, I show how a combination of iconicity and arbitrariness might drive the cultural evolution of language. Iconic words, that is, words with a resemblance between form and meaning (e.g., "boom"), will emerge first, followed by more abstract ones, which are grounded in other words.

In my practice-based research The Archive of Gestures, I revive an array of gestures and movements present in alternative Palestinian narratives, which were suppressed by Israel and left out of mainstream Palestinian history, by re-enacting, deconstructing and commenting on the gestures and context they were performed in, using interactive video dance installation and participatory performance as artistic and archival forms. In this chapter I analyse four artistic works that resulted from this research: A Fidayee Son in Moscow (2014), Cells of Illegal Education (2016), Gesturing Refugees (2018), What My Body Can/t Remember (2019). In all the works interactivity and participation with the audience play a central role. Here, I explain how moving-thinking together, through re-enacting, transforming and transmitting latent gestural archives, helps embody and translate the stories and their gestures to the audience members’ bodies. This allows the audience to identify with the context of these stories, creating empathy and contributing towards future responsibility.

Human history has created a large variety of sign systems for communication. These systems were developed at different times for different purposes. While oral language has developed as part of human biological evolution, written texts, realistic pictures, maps, and graphs are cultural inventions. Human oral language might have originated from gestures supplemented by sound patterns. It is a biological anchored feature of the human species, as manifested in somatic, perceptual, and neurological pre-adaptations. Early writing systems used iconic ideograms which were gradually transformed into symbols. This made production and discrimination easier but increased the required amount of learning. Further development led to writing systems using phonograms plus orthographic ideograms. Realistic pictures are older than writing systems. They represent content by similarity but also show allegories of social relationships. Maps are realistic pictures of a geographic area facing the problem of how to present a curved earth surface on a two-dimensional surface. Graphs are visuo-spatial objects representing a subject matter based on analogy due to inherent common structural properties.

Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

This chapter examines the role of nonverbal feedback, particularly gestures. It reviews and evaluates the findings of current research in this area and offers suggestions for future research. The chapter begins by discussing how gestures are used in a language classroom followed by an examination of their effectiveness in the development of different language skills including vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and comprehension. The relationship between learners’ individual differences, gestures, and corrective feedback is also addressed.

Our appearance, gestures, body language, and other types of nonverbal communication convey tremendous amounts of information about who we are, our status, attitudes, and even our goals in an interaction. Nonverbal communication is perceived quickly and mostly subconsciously, drawing on culturally patterned expectations. Since there are few commonalities across cultures in nonverbal cues, there are ample opportunities for miscommunication, such as when and how we touch others, how we relate to time, or what clothes we wear. This chapter explores various types of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, gaze, gestures and bodily movements, posture, contact, spatial behavior, clothes and appearance, and nonverbal aspects of speech. At the end of the chapter, these concepts are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language teaching activities.

Human infants are remarkable learners. Although they are born with very limited knowledge about the world around them, by the end of the second year of life they demonstrate highly sophisticated reasoning abilities and a robust understanding of the physical and social world. Despite recent discoveries in what infants know, important questions still exist surrounding how they come to know it. In this chapter, I explore one mechanism that spurs early learning – a drive to seek out information through preverbal gestures. To do so, I first review the evidence for information seeking during infancy (e.g. attentional biases). I then turn to infants’ understanding of adults as rich sources of information, and describe how infants transition from attending to information to explicitly seeking it out. Here, I propose that long before infants acquire the verbal abilities to ask questions, they point to request information. I then argue that interrogative pointing plays a direct role in learning, with a specific focus on the link between pointing and word learning. I conclude with an exploration of infants’ transition from preverbal to verbal information requesting through question asking.

As Bernardo Dovizi had said, as long as there was fighting in Italy, Piero was not without hope. So although the new year, 1498, opened with Piero enjoying ‘little reputation and less credit’, renewed fighting in Italy kept his hopes alive for the remaining years of his life.1 Two events helped to change the political scene, principally the succession of Louis of Orleans to the French throne in April, but also the execution of Savonarola the following month. With claims on Milan as well as Naples, King Louis XII forged new alliances in Italy, most notably with Venice and Pope Alexander VI, who used France to further his son Cesare Borgia’s attempts to build a state for himself in central Italy. The destabilisation they created encouraged Piero’s military adventurism, while the final unravelling of Savonarola’s life – his attack on the pope, his last defiant sermons and the aborted Trial by Fire in March and early April 1498 – also helped to revivify Piero by discrediting the Florentine government at home and abroad.2 So Piero’s little-known movements in these years provide a novel outside-in view of Florence’s crisis that helps to explain the threatened coup d’état in 1500 and the life Gonfaloniership two years later.