David McNeill - Wikipedia

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David McNeill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States)[1]

is an American psychologist and writer specializing in
scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially
the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures
that accompany discourse.[2]

Contents
1 Life and career
1.1 Education
1.2 Academic positions held
1.3 Honors and awards
1.4 Research
2 Research on the psychology of language and
gesture
2.1 Central idea
2.2 Growth Points and multi-modality
2.3 Minimal units
2.4 Non-modularity
2.5 Connections to phenomenology
2.6 Language origin and Meads Loop
2.7 Mirror neuron "twist"
2.8 Natural selection
3 Reception
4 Selected publications
4.1 Books written
4.2 Books edited
5 Reviews of McNeill's work
6 Footnotes
7 External links

Born

1933 (age 8384)

California, United States

Pen name

David McNeill

Occupation

Psychologist and writer

Language

English

Nationality

American

Education

A.B. and Ph.D in psychology,

University of California, Berkeley,
California, United States; Center for
Cognitive Studies, Harvard University

Alma mater University of California, Berkeley,

California, USA
Genre

Psychology

Subject

Scientific research into

psycholinguistics; language, thought
and gesture

Life and career

David McNeill is a professor of the University of Chicago in Illinois, and a writer.[2][3][4]

Education
McNeill studied for and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1962, both
in psychology, at the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to study at the Center for Cognitive
Studies, Harvard University in 1963.[2]

Academic positions held

Harvard University, Research Fellow, Center for Cognitive Studies (19631965)
University of Michigan, Assistant to Associate Professor of Psychology (19651969)
Harvard University, Visiting Associate Professor of Psychology (19671969)
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University of Chicago, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics (19692001)

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Member (19731975)
University of Chicago, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics Emeritus (2001)
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, Fellow (19831984)
Duke University, Department of Anthropology, Visiting Professor (1984)
University of Chicago, Chair, Department of Psychology (19911997)
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Visitor (19981999)[2]

Honors and awards

As well as being a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi and holding several academic fellowships
including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973-1974, McNeill was Gustaf Stern Lecturer at the University of
Gteborg, Sweden in 1999; and Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from
20022005.[2]
In 1995, McNeill won the Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, University of Chicago; and in 1995
he was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award from the University of Chicago Press for the book Hand and
Mind.[2][5]
In 2004, the National-Louis University (a multi-campus institution in Chicago) Office of Institutional
Management Grants Center received an American Psychological Association Grant for Gale Stam
Psychology College of Arts and Sciences to provide "a Festschrift conference honoring Professor David
McNeill of the University of Chicago."[6]

Research
McNeill specializes in psycholinguistics, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language
to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.[2]
In his research, McNeill has studied videoed discourses of the same stimulus stories being retold "together
with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by "speakers of different languages, [...] by non-native
speakers at different stages of learning English, by children at various ages, by adolescent deaf children not
exposed to language models, and by speakers with neurological impairments (aphasic, right hemisphere
damaged, and split-brain patients)."[2]
This and other research has formed the subject matter of a number of books which McNeill has written
through his career.

Research on the psychology of language and gesture

Central idea
The "growth point" is a key theoretical concept in McNeills approach to psycholinguistics and is central to
his work on gestures, specifically those spontaneous and unwitting hand movements that regularly
accompany informal speech. The growth point, or GP, posits that gestures and speech are unified and need
to be considered jointly. For McNeill, gestures are in effect (or, McNeill would say, in reality) the speakers
thought in action, and integral components of speech, not merely accompaniments or additions. Much
evidence supports this idea, but its full implications have not always been recognized.[7][8][9]

Growth Points and multi-modality

McNeill argues that thought is multimodal: both vocal-linguistic and manual-gestural, and the resulting

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semiotic opposition fuels change. In terms of semiotics, as a kind of sign, a gesture is "global" (in that the
meanings of the "parts"the hand shapes, space, direction, articulation-depend in a top-down fashion on
the meaning of the whole) and "synthetic" (in that several meanings are bundled into one gesture). Gestures,
when they combine, do not form what Ferdinand de Saussure terms syntagmatic values; they paint a more
elaborate picture but contain nothing corresponding to the emerging syntagmatic value of a noun as a direct
object when combined with a verb (hit the ball, where ball, by itself, is not a direct object). Speech
contrasts on each of these points: it is bottom-up, analytic and combinatoric.
The synchronization of speech and gesture is the key to this theoretical GP unit. Gestures offer one kind of
symbol, language a different kind. These two kinds, when synchronized in a GP, bring semiotically opposite
modes of thinking together at the same time. This synchrony of opposites sets in motion a dialectic of
imagery and linguistic form that is the "fuel" of the dynamic dimension of language in which forms emerge,
say their piece, and disappear. The gestures coincide with speech, and the resulting dialectic is a model of
this dimension.
In one example, a speaker describes an episode in a cartoon she has watched: He goes up thrugh the pipe
this time. (In this example, boldface type indicates where the gesture movements occurred; the accent
indicates speech emphasis.) At up the hand rises upward; at thrugh the fingers spread outward to
create an interior space. These movements take place concurrently and in synchrony with up thrugh, the
linguistic package that carries the same meanings. This creates a joint realization of the idea of upward
motion and interiority, with interiority highlighted in both gesture (the flayed-out fingers) and speech (the
accented vowel). But the speech divides the event into semantic units: a directed path (up), plus the idea
of interiority (through), which must be combined to obtain the composite meaning of the whole. In the
gesture, this composite meaning is fused into one symbol and the semantic units are simultaneous. The
synchronized speech and gesture are co-expressive but semiotically non-redundant.
A GP forms a single mental package or idea unit out of these semiotically opposed components. McNeill
argues that this semiotic opposition is unstable, and that the processes initiated to resolve it, called
"unpacking", propel thought and speech forward. This creates a new form of human cognition that animates
language and gives it a dynamic dimension.

Minimal units
Speech and gesture, taken together, comprise minimal units of human linguistic cognition. Following Lev
Vygotsky in defining a "unit" as the smallest package that retains the quality of being a whole, in this case
the whole of a gesture-language unity, McNeill calls the minimal psychological unit a Growth Point because
it is meant to be the initial pulse of thinking-for-(and while)-speaking, out of which a dynamic process of
organization emerges. The linguistic component of speech categorizes the visual and actional imagery of the
gesture; the imagery of the gesture grounds the linguistic categories in a visual spatial frame.

Non-modularity
The GP theory contrasts to "modular" theories such as those of Willem Levelt (de:Willem Levelt), which
posit a sequence in which thinking precedes and speech follows. A sequence of thinking before speaking has
no place in the growth point. In a GP, speech and thought are inseparable, unified, and simultaneous.

Connections to phenomenology
McNeill employs the concept of material carriers, a phrase used by Vygotsky[10] to refer to the
embodiment of meaning in enactments or material experiences to further develop the concepts of Meads
Loop and the GP. A material carrier enhances the symbolizations representational power. The concept
implies that the gesture, "the actual motion of the gesture itself", is a dimension of meaning. This
enhancement is possible if the gesture "is" the very image; not an "expression" or "representation" of it, but

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"it". From this viewpoint, a gesture is an image in its most developed: that is, its most materially, naturally
embodied form. The absence of a gesture is the converse, an image in its least material form. The material
carrier concept thus helps explain how an imagery-language dialectic can take place in absence of gesture.
When no gesture occurs, there is still global-synthetic imagery in a dialectic with linguistic categorization,
but we experience it at the "lowest level of materialization". It is not an alteration of the dialectic of its
essentials-the simultaneous rendering of meaning in opposite semiotic modes-but a bleached version of it.
McNeill furthers this conception of the material carrier by turning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for insight into
the duality of gesture and language. Gesture, the instantaneous, global, nonconventional component, is not
an external accompaniment of speech, which is the sequential, analytic, combinatoric component; it is not a
representation of meaning, but instead meaning inhabits it. Merleau-Ponty links gesture and existential
significance:
The link between the word and its living meaning is not an external accompaniment to
intellectual processes, the meaning inhabits the word, and language is not an external
accompaniment to intellectual processes. We are therefore led to recognize a gestural or
existential significance to speech. Language certainly has inner content, but this is not
self-subsistent and self-conscious thought. What then does language express, if it does not
express thoughts? It presents or rather it is the subjects taking up of a position in the world of
his meanings. [emphasis in the original][11]
For McNeill, the GP is a mechanism geared to this existential significance of speech, this taking up a
position in the world. Gesture, as part of the GP, is inhabited by the same living meaning that inhabits the
word (and beyond, the whole of a discourse). A deeper answer to the query, therefore-when we see a
gesture, what are we seeing?--is that we see part of the speakers current cognitive being, "her very mental
existence", at the moment it occurs. This too is part of the origin of language by Mead's Loop (and explains
the gestural leakage of lies.[12] By performing the gesture, a core idea is brought into concrete existence and
becomes part of the speakers own existence at that moment. A gesture is not a representation, or is not only
such: it is a form of being. From a first-person perspective, the gesture is part of the immediate existence of
the speaker. Gestures (and words, etc., as well) are themselves thinking in one of its many forms, not only
expressions of thought, "but thought, i.e., cognitive being, itself". To the speaker, gesture and speech are not
only "messages" or communications, but are a way of cognitively existing, of cognitively being, at the
moment of speaking.
To make a gesture, from this perspective, is to bring thought into existence on a concrete plane, just as
writing out a word can have a similar effect. The greater the felt departure of the thought from the immediate
context, the more likely is its materialization in a gesture, because of this contribution to being. Conversely,
when "newsworthiness" is minimal materialization diminishes and in some cases disappears, even though a
GP is active; in these cases gestures may cease while (empty) speech continues, or vice versa, speech ceases
and a vague gesture takes place. Thus, gestures are more or less elaborated and GPs more or less
materialized depending on the importance of material realization to the "existence" of the thought.

Language origin and Meads Loop

In terms of the origin of language, the GP "predicts" (of the remote past) that whatever evolved led to a GP
system of semiotic oppositions. This provides an empirical test of all theories on the origin of language: Can
the theory in question explain the observed speech-gesture-thought unity of human cognition? The widely
popular "gesture-first" theory, according to which language began as pure gesture without speech, fails this
test. In fact, it fails it twice, predicting what did not evolve (that speech supplanted gesture) and not
predicting what did evolve (our own speech-gesture unity). An alternative, which McNeill calls "Mead's
Loop" after the philosopher George Herbert Mead, explains this unity. It too claims that gesture was
essential to the origin of language, but not because it was "primitive" or more accessible. Rather, it says that
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speech could not have evolved without gesture; neither could gesture have evolved without speech. Speech
and gesture originated together, at the same time, in response to the same selection pressures.

Mirror neuron "twist"

G. H. Mead said that a gesture is significant when it arouses in the person making it the same response it
arouses in others (which explains why gestures occur face-to-face and over the phone but not to a tape
recorder).[13] According to Mead's Loop, mirror neurons underwent a "twist" whereby they came to respond
to ones own gestures as if they came from someone else: this is what evolved. The "twist" works because it
brings the significance of ones own gestures into the same areas of the brain where speech is being
orchestrated. Gesture imagery co-opts the orchestration of speech. The result is units of speech and gesture
as the GP envisions. Uniquely in the animal kingdom, gestures came to orchestrate movements of the vocal
tract, transforming the "vegetative" system of eating and breathing into an organ of speaking. According to
Mead's Loop, this role of imagery in speech orchestration is a major reason why we gesture as we speak.

Natural selection
Meads Loop and the mirror neuron "twist" would be naturally selected in scenarios where sensing ones
own actions as social is advantageous. For example, in imparting information to infants, where it gives the
adult the sense of being an instructor as opposed to being just a doer with an onlooker, as is the case with
chimpanzees.[14] Entire cultural practices of childrearing depend upon this sense.[15][16] Self-awareness as an
agent is necessary for this advantage to take hold. For Mead's Loop to have been selected the adult must be
sensitive to her own gestures as social actions.
The link between the GP and self-aware agency also appears in childrens language development, which can
be linked to the origin of language in a version of the long-dismissed "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"
hypothesis of recapitulation theory. McNeill considers that when something emerges in current-day
ontogenesis only at a certain stage of development, the original natural selection of the feature (if there was
any) might have taken place in a similar psychological milieu in phylogenesis. This opens a window onto the
mindset of the creature in which the Mead's Loop "twist" was evolving. As a mode of reasoning, it exploits
the fact that childrens intellectual status is not fixed but changing. Thus, McNeill argues, we look for new
states that seem pegged to steps in the ontogenesis of GPs and Mead's Loop underlying them, and consider
these steps as possible signals from ancient phylogenesis. Evidence shows that self-aware agency could be
such a signal. The GP emerges around age 3 or 4 years, which is also about when children first become
aware of themselves as agents, since before that age the speech and gestures of children have the
character of sharing experiences with the other rather than of communicating messages to the Other, as
put by Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan in their 1963 book, Symbol Formation. The theory of mind (which
is really awareness of other perspectives) also emerges about this time, and likewise depends on self-aware
agency.

Reception
McNeill's books have received coverage in a number of academic journals and in the general press.
A 1991 article in the Chicago Reader;[17] a 2006 article in the Scientific American, Mind magazine;[18] and
a 2008 article in Boston Globe[19] describe McNeill's work on the language of gesture in detail.
The Acquisition of Language was reviewed in the International Journal of Language & Communication
Disorders in 1971.[20]
The Conceptual Basis of Language was reviewed in The Conceptual Basis of Language in 1980.[21]

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Hand and Mind was reviewed in Language and Speech;[22] the American Journal of Psychology;[23] and
Language[24] in 1994.
Gesture and Thought was reviewed in Language in Society[25] and Metaphor and Symbol[26] in 2007.

Selected publications
Books written
McNeill, David (1970). The Acquisition of Language: The Study of Developmental Psycholinguistics.
New York, USA: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-044379-0. (Paperback)
McNeill, David (October 1979). The Conceptual Basis of Language. New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum /
John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 0-470-26663-5. (Hardcover)
McNeill, David (February 1987). Psycholinguistics: A New Approach. New York, USA; United
Kingdom: Harper & Row / HarperCollins College Div. ISBN 0-06-044387-1. (Paperback).
McNeill, David (15 January 1996). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago,
Illinois, USA: University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-56134-8. (Paperback)
McNeill, David (8 November 2005). Gesture and Thought. Chicago, Illinois, USA: University Of
Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-51462-5. (Hardcover)
McNeill, David (30 August 2012). How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Human Evolution.
New York, USA; United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-107-60549-0. (Hardcover)

Books edited
McNeill, David (ed.) (August 2000). Language and Gesture (Language Culture and Cognition).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-77166-8. (Hardcover, paperback ISBN
0-521-77761-5)

Reviews of McNeill's work

Unknown (October 1971). "Book Reviews: The Acquisition of Language: The Study of
Developmental Psycholinguistics. David McNeill". International Journal of Language &
Communication Disorders. Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists. 6 (2): 177183.
doi:10.3109/13682827109011546. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Unknown (September 1980). "Book Reviews: The Conceptual Basis of Language By David McNeill
(1979)". International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. Royal College of Speech &
Language Therapists. 15 (2): 143153. doi:10.3109/13682828009011380. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Henderson, Harold (24 October 1991). "More Than Words Can Say: The Language of Gestures, as
Translated by U. of C. Psycholinguist David McNeill". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Studdert-Kennedy, Michael (1994). "Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought".
Language and Speech. SAGE Publications. 37 (2): 203209. doi:10.1177/002383099403700208.
Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Feyereisen, Pierre (Spring 1994). "Book Reviews: Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about
Thought by David McNeill". The American Journal of Psychology. University of Illinois Press. 107
(1): 149155. JSTOR 1423299.
Fischer, Susan D. (June 1994). "Reviews: Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought by
David McNeill". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 70 (2): 345350. JSTOR 415833.
Segrin, Chris (2002). "Book Reviews". Journal of Language and Social Psychology. SAGE
Publications. 21 (2): 181183. doi:10.1177/0261927X02021002008. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Wachsmuth, Ipke (October 2006). "Gestures Offer Insight". Scientific American, Mind. Retrieved
2010-02-07.
Monaghan, Leila (2007). "Book Reviews: Dave McNeill, Gesture and Thought". Language in Society.

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Cambridge University Press. 36 (5): 764768. doi:10.1017/S0047404507070704. Retrieved

2010-02-07.
Mittelberg, Irene (June 2007). "Gesture & Thought. David McNeill, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2005". Metaphor and Symbol. Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group. 22 (3): 281290.
doi:10.1080/10926480701357711. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
Bennett, Drake (4 May 2008). "Hand power". Boston Globe. Retrieved 2010-02-07.

Footnotes
1. Staff (07-02-2007). "D. McNeill (nias)". Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences (NIAS). Retrieved 2010-02-07. Check date values in: |date= (help)
2. Staff. "McNeill Lab Friends: Members Home: Professor David McNeill". University of Chicago, Department
of Psychology. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
3. McNeill, David. "David McNeill - LinkedIn". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
4. Staff. "Who's Who in Social Sciences: David McNeill". AcademicKeys.com. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
5. Harms, William (27 April 1995). "McNeill wins Laing Award". University of Chicago Chronicle. Retrieved
2010-02-05. Vol. 14, No. 16.
6. Staff. "Grants Center - National-Louis University". National-Louis University. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
7. McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
8. McNeill, David. 2005. Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
9. Kendon, Adam. 2004. Gesture: visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Vygotsky, Lev. S. 1987. Thought and Language. Edited and translated by E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar (revised
and edited by A. Kozulin). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith, trans. London and New York:
Routledge.
12. Ekman, Paul. 1981. "Mistakes when deceiving." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 269-278.
13. Mead, George Herbert. 1974. Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris
ed. and introduction). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
15. Vygotsky, Lev. S. 1978. Mind in Society. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (eds.).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16. John-Steiner, Vera, Panofsky, Carolyn P. and Smith, Larry W. (eds.). 1994. Sociocultural Approaches to
Language and Literacy: An interactionist perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17. Henderson, Harold (24 October 1991). "More Than Words Can Say: The Language of Gestures, as Translated
by U. of C. Psycholinguist David McNeill". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
18. Wachsmuth, Ipke (October 2006). "Gestures Offer Insight". Scientific American, Mind. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
19. Bennett, Drake (4 May 2008). "Hand power". Boston Globe. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
20. Unknown (October 1971). "Book Reviews: The Acquisition of Language: The Study of Developmental
Psycholinguistics. David McNeill". International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. Royal
College of Speech & Language Therapists. 6 (2): 177183. doi:10.3109/13682827109011546. Retrieved
2010-02-07.
21. Unknown (September 1980). "Book Reviews: The Conceptual Basis of Language By David McNeill (1979)".
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. Royal College of Speech & Language
Therapists. 15 (2): 143153. doi:10.3109/13682828009011380. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
22. Studdert-Kennedy, Michael (1994). "Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought". Language and
Speech. SAGE Publications. 37 (2): 203209. doi:10.1177/002383099403700208. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
23. Feyereisen, Pierre (Spring 1994). "Book Reviews: Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought by
David McNeill". The American Journal of Psychology. University of Illinois Press. 107 (1): 149155.
JSTOR 1423299.
24. Fischer, Susan D. (June 1994). "Reviews: Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought by David
McNeill". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 70 (2): 345350. JSTOR 415833.
25. Monaghan, Leila (2007). "Book Reviews: Dave McNeill, Gesture and Thought". Language in Society.
Cambridge University Press. 36 (5): 764768. doi:10.1017/S0047404507070704. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
26. Mittelberg, Irene (June 2007). "Gesture & Thought. David McNeill, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005".
Metaphor and Symbol. Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group. 22 (3): 281290.
doi:10.1080/10926480701357711. Retrieved 2010-02-07.

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External links
McNeill Lab: Center for Gesture and Speech Research (http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/) at the
University of Chicago
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_McNeill&oldid=752564221"
Categories: Living people American psychologists Psycholinguists American non-fiction writers
University of Chicago faculty Psycholinguistics Harvard University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni Guggenheim Fellows 1933 births
University of Michigan staff Phi Beta Kappa members
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