Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:25:20.048Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Growth points cross-linguistically

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

David McNeill
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Jan Nuyts
Affiliation:
Universitaire Instellung Antwerpen, Belgium
Eric Pederson
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
Get access

Summary

Introduction

The overarching problem I address in this chapter is the real-time interaction of speaking and thinking during discourse. Specifically, I use the gestures that co-occur with speech as a way of accessing visual thinking tied to speaking, and with this resource investigate the interaction of speaking and thinking as they are taking place. The theoretical concept with which I propose to picture the nexus of thinking and speaking is the ‘growth point’ – a concept referring to the primitive form, psychologically, from which the full utterance is claimed to emerge. The growth point is a theoretical entity with defined properties that predict empirical data. These data, if observed, serve to confirm the hypothesis.

I have organized the chapter as follows. First, I briefly explain the nature of gestures and how they can be taken as real-time windows on the mind, specifically on visual thinking processes. Secondly, I explain the concept of a growth point itself, and I present some gesture data that illustrate this concept and take into account the interlingual comparisons promised in my title. Thirdly, I describe a type of experiment that might be carried out to test a prediction of the growth-point hypothesis. Fourthly, I sketch how the production of an utterance could proceed from a growth point. And finally, I relate this microgenetic process to the concept of a dialectic, as presented originally in Vygotsky (1987).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×