A history of the study of language origins and the gestural primacy hypothesis

Gordon W. Hewes

In the eighteenth century a gestural origin for language was proposed by several writers, and some thought that apes might have a capacity for language. Renewed interest in these ideas developed in the mid-twentieth century, with systematic studies of human sign-languages, and then experiments to teach Great Apes visual languages.

The modern argument for gestural primacy in language origins draws on several lines of evidence, including the following. Sound is of questionable suitability as the original basis for language, given the greater creative capacity and open-endedness of higher primate manual and digital operations. Regular tool-using in hominids probably evolved before vocal language, and the human brain's left-lateralization for speech could have been tacked on to a previous specialization for predominantly right-handed gestural language and precise sequences of manual manipulations. In relatively simple contexts gestural communication has the distinct advantage of greater transparency and ease of communication.

It is speculated that with increasing manual preoccupations proto-speech developed out of mouth-gestures patterned after hand gestures and combined with vocalizations. Now the development of more abstract conceptual thinking was possible, given that gestural language suffers from proneness to commit the logical fallacy of misplaced concreteness. More recently the invention and diffusion of phonemicized speech acted as the principal stimulus for what we recognize as the cultural revolution of the Upper Palaeolithic. The basic advantage of a small set of phonemic units lies in their cognitive indexical function, their facilitation of storage and rapid retrieval of information from an increasingly larger mental lexicon [Eds].

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