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In:History of Linguistics 2014: Selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XIII), Vila Real, Portugal, 25–29 August 2014
Edited by Carlos Assunção, Gonçalo Fernandes and Rolf Kemmler
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 126] 2016
► pp. 43–52

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The relation of gesture to thought and language

From language origin to cognitive science

Published online: 17 August 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.126.04chr
The relationship between gesture and language has typically been theorized in terms of gesture preceding language along a continuum of evolving symbolization. Recent research in cognitive science and allied fields suggests that, from the beginning, gesture has figured constitutively, along with vocalization, in the communicative process, as it continues to do. This evolved symbiotic relationship between vocalization and co-speech gestures, constructed atop a common neural network and marked by emergent properties, figures in the representation, processing, and transformation of thought – in the embodiment of cognition – and provides an infrastructure for action understanding, for reading the intentions of others.
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