3 ms·

Words, Gestures Are Translated by Same Brain Regions

• foldr 17y ago
  Some counterevidence to their hypothesis is the dissociation in some aphasic patients between the ability to process sign language and the ability to process meaningful gestures that are not part of a sign language. For example, some of these people have quite a bit of difficulty interpreting their native sign language correctly but show completely normal performance in interpreting ordinary gestures or pantomimes. The most striking cases involve iconic signs. Most gestures in a sign language (e.g. ASL) are completely arbitrary, but there are some which look very much like pantomimes of the object or action being described. For some of the aphasic patients, these pantomimic signs are just as hard to interpret in a linguistic context as the arbitrary signs, even though they are perfectly capable of interpreting pantomimes in non-linguistic contexts. This suggests that it can't be precisely the same bit of the brain that's doing both. It seems more likely that what both tasks have in common is something higher level -- an element of trying to figure out what another person is trying to convey, given what you know about them and the context.