The Biological Foundations of Gesture: Motor and Semiotic Aspects [1 ed.] 0898596459, 9780898596458

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The Biological Foundations of Gestures: Motor and Semiotic Aspects

\}' ~~I~~~~~i?G~XP Press NEW YORK AND LONDON

NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROLINGUISTICS a series of books edited by Harry A. Whitaker BRUYER:

The Neuropsychology of Face Perception and Facial Expression KELLER/GOPNIK:

Motor and Sensory Processes in Language

NESPOULOUS/PERRON/LECOURS:

The Biological Foundations of Gestures

VAID:

Language Processing in Bilinguals: Psycholinguistic and Neuropsychological Perspectives

THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF GESTURES: Motor and Semiotic Aspects

Edited by

JEAN-LUC NESPOULOUS Universite de Montreal

PAUL PERRON

University of Toronto

ANDRE ROCH LECOURS Universite de Montreal

\f ~~'~~~~~i?G9Xp Press NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 1986 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Published 2014 by Psychology Press 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Psychology Press 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 1986 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Biological foundations of gestures. "The present volume is the outcome of a symposium on Gestures, Cultures and Communication, held in May 1982 at Victoria College, University of Toronto. This conference . . . which took place during the Third International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies, was organized by the Toronto Semiotic Circle "-Introd. Includes bibliographies and indexes. I. Gesture-Physiological aspects-Congresses. 2. Gesture-Psychological aspects-Congresses. 3. Neuropsychology-Congresses. 4. Motor abilityCongresses. 5. Semiotics-Congresses. 6. Communicative disorders-Physiological aspects-Congresses. I. Nespoulous, Jean-Luc. II. Perron, Paul. III. Lecours, Andre Roch. IV. International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies (3rd : 1982 : Victory College, University of Toronto) V. Toronto Semiotic Circle. [DNLM: 1. Kinesicscongresses. 2. Motor Activity-congresses. BF 637.C45 B615 1982] QP360.B563 1986 152.3 86-2174 ISBN 978-0-898-59645-8 (hbk)

Contents

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In Memoriam (Paul Ivan Yakovlev) Andre Roch Lecours Introduction Jean-Luc Nespoulous, Paul Perron and Andre Roch Lecours

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The Neurological Substratum of Gestures and Motor Activity 14 Developmental Theories of Gesture 16 Pathological Manifestations of Gestural Behavior and Neurological Substratum 17 References 19 PART I: THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GESTURES 1. Current Issues in the Study of Gesture Adam Kendon

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Introduction 23 Defining Gesture 24 Types of Gesture 31 Gesticulation 33 Functions of Gesture 37 References 44 2.

Gestures: Nature and Function Jean-Luc Nespoulous and Andre Roch Lecours

Basic Dichotomies 51 The Analysis of Gestural Behavior Gestural Typologies 55 References 62

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CONTENTS

PART II: THE NEUROLOGICAL SUBSTRATUM OF GESTURES AND MOTOR ACTIVITY 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Brain Organization Underlying Orientation and Gestures: Normal and Pathological Cases Marcel Kinsbourne References 75 Lateral Differences in Gesture Production Pierre Feyereisen Lateral Differences in Movements During Speech of Normal Subjects 78 Gesture Production After Unilateral Brain Damage Conclusions 90 References 90

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From Movement to Gesture: "Here" and "There" as Determinants of Visually Guided Pointing Michele Brouchon, Yves Joanette and Madeleine Samson Methodology 97 Results 100 Discussion 104 References 106 IPSI-Lateral Motor Control Study in a Total Callosal Disconnection Syndrome with Lateral Homonymous Hemianopia Michel Poncet, Daniel Beaubaton and Andre AIi-Cherif Observation 109 Methods 111 Results 112 Discussion 115 References 121 The Eye in the Control of Attention Michael Mair Introduction 123 124 The Eye The Cortex 126 Inattention and Suppression 132 Subcortical Structures 135 Eye Movements 136 Evoked Potential Studies 141 Some Timings 142 Conclusion 143 References 145

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CONTENTS

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PART III: DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES OF GESTURE 8.

Form, Significance and Psychological Potential of Hand Gestures of Infants Colwyn Trevarthen Introduction 149 An Outline of Hand Actions in Infancy 156 A Photographic Corpus of Infant Actions 159 The Case for an Innate Preverbal Expressive System with Compound Asymmetry of Control 183 Gesture and Eupraxis with the Development of Speech References 198

9.

149

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Some Implications of Lateralization for Developmental Psychology Sidney J. Segalowitz

203

Cerebral Organization of Communication in Infants 203 Cerebral Asymmetries and the Development of Thought 207 Summary 210 References 211 10. The Impact of Visual-Spatial Information on the Development of Reading Proficiency in Deaf Children Cheryl Gibson and Sidney J. Sega/owitz Biological Basis of Language 215 Biological Constraints and the Reading Process 220 Neuropsychology and Language Summary 222 References 222 Appendix 224

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PART IV: THE PATHOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF GESTURAL BEHAVIOR 11.

Standard Teaching on Apraxia Andre Roch Lecours, Jean-Luc Nespoulous and Pierre Desaulniers Three Brains and Three Types of Motility 232 Three Families of Motor Disorders of the Limbs Apraxia 234 240 References

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CONTENTS

12. New Perspectives on Apraxia and Related Action Disorders Eric A. Roy Errors in Performance 243 Mechanisms of Apraxia 244 Considerations of the Nature of the Action System References 252

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13. Central Communication Disorders in Deaf Signers Yvan Lebrun and Chantal Leleux Introduction 255 Review of Published Cases Conclusions and Summary References 268

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255 268

14. Deficits in Facial Expression and Movement as a Function of Brain Damage Joan C. Borod, Elissa Koff, Marjorie Perlman Lorch and Marjorie Nicholas

271

Introduction 271 Method 274 Results 280 Discussion 287 References 290 15. Shrugging Shoulders, Frowning Eye-Brows, Smiling Agreement: Mimic and Gesture Communication in the Aphasic Experience Dominique Labourel Introduction 295 Material and Observation Methods 296 The Functions of Mimogestuality 296 Variables Affecting Mimogestuality 304 Some Discussion Elements 305 Conclusion 307 References 308 Author Index Subject Index

309 315

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List of Contributors

Andre Ali-CheriC, Clinique Neurologique, Groupe de Neuropsychologie Experimentale et Clinique, C.H.U. Timone, Marseille, France. Daniel Beaubaton, C.N.R.S. Institut de Neurophysiologie Experimentale et Clinique, C.H.U. Timone, Marseille, France. Joan C. Borod, Aphasia Research Center, Boston V.A. Medical Center, and Neurology Department, Boston University Medical School and Psychiatry Department, Bellevue Hospital Center and New York University Medical School. Michele Brouchon, Laboratoire de Neuropsychologie Humaine, EHESS Departement de Neuropsychologie, C.H.U., Timone, Marseille, France. Pierre Desaulniers, Laboratoire TMophile-Alajouanine, Centre hospitalier Cote-des-Neiges, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Pierre Feyereisen, Research Associate of the National Fund for Scientific Research, University of Louvain, Belgium. Cheryl Gibson, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Yves Joanette, Laboratoire Theophile-Alajouanine, Centre hospitalier Cote-des-Neiges & Faculte de Medecine, Universite de Montreal, Montreal. Quebec, Canada. Adam Kendon, Visiting Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University; formerly Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Connecticut College. Marcel Kinsbourne, Behavioral Neurology Department, Eunice Shriver Center for Mental Retardation, Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Elissa KofT, Aphasia Research Center, Boston V.A. Medical Center, and Neurology Department, Boston University Medical School; and Psychology Department, Wellesley College. Dominique Labourel, Laboratoire de Neuropsychologie et de Reeducation du Langage, H6pital Neurologique, Lyon, France. Yvan Lebrun, Department of Neurolinguistics, School of Medicine V.U.B., Brussels, Belgium. Andre-Roch Lecours, Laboratoire Theophile-Alajouanine, Centre hospitalier C6te-dcs-Neiges & FacuIte de Medecine, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Chantal Leleux, Department of Neurolinguistics, School of Medicine, V. U.B., Brussels, Belgium. Michael Mair, Resident Surgical Officer, Moorfield Eye Hospital, London, United Kingdom. Jean-Luc Nespoulous, Laboratoire Theophile-Alajouanine, Centre hospitalier C6te-des-Neiges & Departement de Linguistique, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Marjorie Nicholas, Aphasia Research Center, Boston V.A. Medical Center, and Neurology Department, Boston University Medical School. Marjorie Perlman, Aphasia Research Center, Boston V.A. Medical Center, and Neurology Department, Boston University Medical School.

The Biological Foundations of Gestures: Motor and Semiotic Aspects

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In Memoriam Paul Ivan Yakovlev

1894-1983

Andre Roch Lecours

Those who knew him will cherish their memories of the kind, sensitive, gentle man who was a trusted and loyal friend, adviser, mentor, confidant, and constant source of inspiration. -Thomas Kemper, 1984.

Turetz (Russia) is situated at 55.22 degrees North and 29.15 degrees East of the Greenwich meridian, at the median point of a line separating the Orient from the Occident.! It is there, in the wealthy domain of his maternal grandfather, that Paul Ivan Yakovlev is born on December 15 (Julian calendar) or 28 (Gregorian calendar) of the year 1894. As an aristocrat, his mother speaks French with members of her family (Russian is a language one should speak with servants or at the market, but not with one's kins); his father is a retired imperial army officer. Paul is very young when his mother dies and he is only 9 years old when, at his father's death, he goes to live in Wilno with his mother's younger sister, a widow (with three daughters), who is the director of a private gymnasium for girls. As an adolescent, he decides that he will become a philologist and historian, or else a painter and a sculptor. But time passes and he changes his mind about his future: He thinks of his paternal grandfather, who has been a military surgeon, and he starts considering medicine as a career. An artist has to be a genius or else one isn't worth while .•• but in medicine all you have to do is read lDirect quotes from Paul Yakovlev, printed in bold, are from interviews led by Marjorie LeMay, Thomas Kemper, or the author.

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books, remember it all and you know all the answers. In 1914, he obtains his baccalaureate from the Classical Gymnasium of Wilno. He is 21 years old, in 1915, when he is awarded a Sir Jacob Wylie Fellowship2 and enters the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Military Medicine, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist (a doctor who would manipulate the soul, make it happier, healthier). During the period when Saint Petersburg is becoming Petro grad before it becomes Leningrad, Paul Yakovlev (Fig. 1) grows less and less interested in unleashing the secrets of the psyche and more and more interested in what was 2J. Wylie: of Scottish origin, the founder of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Military Medicine, was physician to Catherine the Great and Surgeon General of the Russian armies until his death in 1834.

IN MEMORIAM

3

called in those days organic psychiatry, in which everything had to have a mechanical explanation. He studies histology with Alexandre Maximov, who is scholarly, with diligence of presentation; organic chemistry with Alexandre Borodine, who keeps his grand piano in his laboratory at the Academy; and physiology with Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev, the founder of Russian neurology, who remains active although he has recently retired, and later with Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov, a most impressive man whose lectures on conditional reflexes are indeed fascinating, and whose extremely antipsychology orientation is a topic of passionate discussions among students of the Academy. This is a troubled period, but young Yakovlev has great masters and he is soon convinced that his own life can only be devoted to the acquisition of scientific knowledge. During the summer vacations of 1916 and 1917, Paul Yakovlev serves as a stretcher-bearer in the Imperial Army. Then comes the October Revolution. Thereafter, the Academy is no longer "Imperial" though it still is a medical school, and a good one. In 1919, Petrograd falls prey to famine, typhus, Spanish influenza and civil war: People around Paul Yakovlev, especially the young people, are terrorized and confused. At the end of the year, Trotsky'S Red Army needs physicians: the students of the Academy therefore receive their diplomas 6 months ahead of time, on December 25. Paul Yakovlev is aware that Russia cannot, in the foreseeable future, provide him with the opportunity to carry on with his scientific education. Moved by a powerful feeling of instinctive biological survival and after consulting with Maximov, he takes the decision to act accordingly. On the morning of December 27, he and a Polish colleague, Trachinski, pretending that they have been charged with a public health mission, board a train heading for the Finnish border where local (Finns and White Russians) as well as English, American, and German troups are closely watching the movements of the Trotskist anny. In order to avoid having to present their manufactured ... certificate and to answer the questions of the red army inspector, the police, the inspector controlling the passports, the two friends move from one wagon to the next till they find themselves on the crowded rear platform of the train. Alongside the railroad tracks, there are snowy woods and, beyond the woods, the Gulf of Finland, frozen solid. In spite of bitter cold winds, Paul Yakovlev and his friend persuade one another that the Gulf constitutes the shortest and safest route out of Russia. Twenty kilometers or so before the border, in the middle of the night, dressed with several layers of clothes, they slip off the slow moving train and they start walking in the snowstorm. Beside their certificates and diplomas, they are carrying black bread, bacon, a revolver, a compass, 800 Imperial Rubles and white blankets. The latter are used whenever the generators of searchlights are heard and beams ripple too close (one then flops down, covers oneself, and hopes one has become invisible). At one point, Trachinski extirpates a bottle from his bag: It contains a (pinkish) mixture of laboratory alcohol and something else (cocaine?): Paul Yakovlev's companion has stolen the ingredients at the Academy on Christmas Eve and the

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concoction now turns out to be of the greatest help. When the sun rises, on December 28, the day of Paul Yakovlev's 25th anniversary, the two reach the shore and seek safety inside empty barrels near a deserted cement factory; a dog passes by, sniffs at the terrorized fugitives, and wanders on: a stray dog that has long learned that minding one's own business is now one of the behaviors making one's survival more likely. With night coming, Yakovlev and Trachinski resume their outing toward destiny. At dawn, on December 29, as they emerge from the snowy bushes bordering on the Gulf, the two companions are arrested by Finnish guards. One of them, unbelievably, recognizes Paul Yakovlev from a previous visit to Petrograd. This makes things easier but the pair is nonetheless sent to Coventry: The Finns will accept Russian refugees only when sure that they are not attacked by typhus or some other dreadful disease. The two survive quarantine, shake hands, and part forever. Trachinski's plan is to go and study butterflies in Siam. Paul Yakovlev spends a few months in Finland, making a little money in Helsingfors (now Helsinki) at one time and in Aabo (now Turku) at another time. He then decides that the day has come for him to find a place where he can return to his scientific quest: Given the interest that he has in psychic disturbances resulting from brain damage, and also given the advice of his professors in Petrograd, his target is the private clinic which Hermann Oppenheim has opened in 1890, after having been denied Westphal's succession by the Prussian Secretary of Education, and which has progressively outclassed the Charite as the international center of clinical neurology in Berlin (Weil, 1970). Paul Yakovlev therefore presents himself at the German embassy with his Academy diploma and a few letters of recommendation written by his Russian professors: But Oppenheim has died earlier in 1919, before Yakovlev's protectors dated, wrote and signed their letters, and the recommendee is now suspected of counterfeiting. As these events require reflexion and reorientation, Paul Yakovlev decides to stay in Helsingfors a little longer. Until March 1920, he works in the port where his job is to inspect a cargo of Swedish matches ("Vulcan") that have been damaged by sea water: For a few months, he hand-picks boxes-dry matches on one side and wet ones on the other-while pondering various scenarios: Germany being excluded, where to go next? France and the Salpetriere: After all, he is quite fluent in French and he has read everything that Charcot and his disciples and successors have written. In April, Paul Yakovlev boards a ship to England. In London, as in the other great capitals of Western Europe, it is generally believed that Bolchevism will not survive and the Russian embassy has remained faithful to the Tzar: There, refugees can easily trade Rubles for Sterling. Paul Yakovlev can survive and, after having by chance discovered-while taking a walk through the streets of London-the existence and seat of the British-Russian Brotherhood Society, he even is able to earn an extra hundred Pounds or so writing reports on the state of public health in Russia since the Fall of 1917. October the fourth, 1920, is the

IN MEMORIAM

5

day of the first commercial flight between London and Paris: Paul Yakovlev, too poor to buy a ticket, feels considerable frustration, but this same day, he procures a place on the boat-train that travels from London to Paris via Dover and Boulogne. In Paris, more precisely in the Latin Quarter, near the Pantheon, Paul Yakovlev rents a room in Madame Bourdon's boarding house. Of Madame Bourdon, he was later to say, with obvious fondness and gratitude, that she was very strict as to monthly payments but acted in a motherly manner with the petits meteques from Haiti, Paraguay, and Mexico who were then her guests and, especially, with this Russian petit metE~que who, whatever the hour of day or night, paced back and forth his limited private space above the entresol dining room (Monsieur Yakovlev, vous etes un maoiaque). A few days after his arrival in Paris, Paul Yakovlev rings at Charles Richet's3 door and tells him that he comes on behalf of a Cambridge colleague, Professor Daniel Gardner; he explains that he has met and befriended Gardner in London and he presents Richet with a letter of recommendation which Gardner has recently written for him. Richet is favorably impressed and he introduce"s the young Russian physician to a dearest friend, Madame Abrikossov, one of the last of Charcot's students, who has retained friendly relationships with the Salpetriere. Soon thereafter, Paul Yakovlev becomes a "stagiaire etranger" at the "Clinique des maladies du systeme nerveux" where, following Fulgence Raymond and Joseph Jules Dejerine, Pierre Marie has recently assumed Jean-Martin Charcot's chair. At the Faculty, it is decided that Paul Yakovlev's medical studies are valid but that, in order to fulfill local requirements, he will have to recommence internship in obstetrics, pediatrics, gynecology and ... infectious diseases. The candidate happily complies, agreeing that, at least for three out of four, these requirements appear to be reasonable in view of the fact that he has graduated from a military institution. When Pierre Marie retires and yields Charcot's chair to Georges Guillain, Paul Yakovlev goes to work at the Pitie, next door to the Salpetriere, with Joseph Fran