Evidence Suggests Humans Share a Universal Non-Verbal Language

Evidence Suggests, Humans Share a Universal , Non-Verbal Language.

New research suggests that humans share an innate non-verbal communication system that emerges when people gesture without talking.

ScienceAlert reports that researchers studied the gestures of adults and children in an attempt to understand how language impacts the way people think.

The research also aimed to determine how humans construct and express ideas, which can be seen when they gesture without speaking.

In addition to gestures, this universal system of non-verbal communication includes body language, eye contact and facial expressions, all of which indicate how a person is feeling.

The researchers from Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta found that language begins influencing nonverbal representations of events at an early age.

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The team was led by Şeyda Özçalışkan, a psychological scientist at GSU who studies language development across different types of learners and different language speakers.

In the team's latest study, 100 children were asked to describe an action first verbally along with hand gestures, and then again without speaking.

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Half of the children were native English speakers, while the other half were native Turkish speakers.

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The researchers looked to determine if the children's native language impacted the order in which they chose to express an idea with gestures.

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The differences observed between the two groups reportedly disappeared when asked to describe something without speaking.

The team's findings were published in the journal 'Language and Cognition.'