queerbluedeer

[queerbluedeer]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[queerbluedeer]

“Knives are for cutting potatoes, not for scratching glass.”

Well, maybe if there was an actual shady potato peddler on the tram.. Then people would consider this option a bit more.. 

-L.F.

[queerbluedeer]

something awful happening on this blog where i post arguments that historian is a proper profession and not a glorified hobby and then post news that a major us university has halted all language studies admissions (including classics and other historical languages) and is revising its entire undergrad curriculum because they deem anything not english and not ''''american'''' superfluous and not beneficent.

your anti-intellectualism does not exist in a vacuum. the humanities is not a hobby. scholars are not the enemy. administrations working with and bowing down to a fascist regime are, and this is what kills diversity and critical thought. this is another form of censorship.

[queerbluedeer]

Ursula K. Le Guin has truly, truly never missed even once

[queerbluedeer]

Not my sky [ 11 colors ]

[queerbluedeer]

I was looking for references and stumbled across a series of paintings from 1930s by Soviet painter Alexander Samokhvalov called "The young women of metro construction"

[queerbluedeer]

[queerbluedeer]

the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

[queerbluedeer]

fuck i just saw that there are some google street view photo spheres in the gaza strip and now im fucked up

cause the satellite view is recent and its a nightmare just shattered gray expanses of rubble and all these deep ruts through the dirt everywhere that looks like some kind of machinery.

but the photo spheres are from before the buildings were destroyed so there are these cute little courtyard gardens with olive trees and pots with herbs painted in colors and nice little apartment buildings with laundry out to dry on the balconies. and when you zoom out to satellite its just completely obliterated wasteland of rubble and debris

[queerbluedeer]

small potatoes – 4.20

[queerbluedeer]

most basic treatments for sickness involve some form of salt water (drinking electrolytes, gargling with warm salt water, epsom salt baths) as a way of microdosing going to the seaside

[queerbluedeer]

So it turns out I actually have to build the life I want to live

[queerbluedeer]

by tucker

[queerbluedeer]

“To ‘violate Elektra’ would be to stop saying no to evil and filth. Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax. These characters usually express defiance in some heroic action - Antigone buries her brother, Ajax falls on his sword. Elektra has the same kind of raw, stubborn, scandalous soul, but her circumstances are different: Elektra is deprived of action. The play begins with two men centre stage making a plan that will change her life and deciding not to tell her about it, although she is hovering just inside the door (they can hear her weeping). The play ends with two men centre stage marching into the house to complete the revenge plot while Elektra is left outside to follow after them or stand and wait, no one seems to care. The play’s centrepiece is a deception scene in which two men manipulate Elektra with lies to a point of near hysteria. She is an adult but unmarried female in the house of a mother who hates her and she has neither social function nor emotional context. She seems to squat on the doorstep of the house rather than live inside. Her sister calls her a maniac and waves her ideas away. Her brother treats her as superfluous to his plans - he finds her wild, emotional, depressing. She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her.”

— Anne Carson, An Oresteia (via flores-et-dracones)

[queerbluedeer]

Hey y'all. I received a message from @samy-family1 (#628 on @gazavetters) asking for donations to help Sami and his son leave Gaza and reunite with Sami's wife in Egypt. Please spread these links however you can - tag mutuals, get the links off of Tumblr and text or email them, just get them in front of as many people as possible. If you can, donate through the links below, both fundraisers for Sami and his family. More information is on the fundraisers.

Gofundme

Chuffed

[queerbluedeer]

Now that zionist occupation announced they are going to occupy all of Gaza, their genocidal intent is clear. This was always about ethnic cleansing. That's why they systematically destroyed Gaza and murdered so many civilians. If you still support Israel, you are openly in favor of genocide.