The Protean Pointing Gesture: Variation in a Building Block of Human Communication

The Protean Pointing Gesture: Variation in a Building Block of Human Communication Kensy Cooperrider (kensy@uchicago.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Chicago 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637 Rafael Nunez (nunez@cogsci.ucsd.edu) Department of Cognitive Science, University of California – San Diego 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093 James Slotta (slottaj@gmail.com) Department of Anthropology, University of California – San Diego 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093 Abstract on these questions. In the folk theories of the English- speaking world and other so-called WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) societies, there is a strong association between pointing and extension of the forefinger, an association enshrined in the English colloquial terms “index” or “pointer” finger. This forefinger-pointing association is not just a matter of terminology. A recent study of infant gestures in seven far- flung speech communities found in each one a preference for index finger pointing over other kinds of manual or non- manual pointing (Liszkowski et al., 2012). Use of the index finger as a kind of developmental pointing default may in fact have its roots in the anatomy of the human hand. When the hand is at rest, the index finger protrudes relative to the other fingers in human children and adults but not in chimpanzees (Povinelli et al., 1994). And, indeed, notwithstanding impressionistic claims made about remote cultures, use of the index finger for pointing has been found in every community in which it has been sought. These facts taken together suggest that index finger pointing may be a strong candidate for a human universal. Countering this swelling tide of evidence for the extended index finger as a species-wide privileged form of the gesture, however, are a handful of reports of substantive cultural differences in how humans point. In several groups, variations in pointing handshape, such as the flat or horned hand, carry conventional meanings (Wilkins, 2003; Kendon & Versante, 2003). Other studies have described conventionalized ways of pointing non-manually, such as by protruding the lips (Sherzer, 1972; Enfield, 2001) or by scrunching the nose (Cooperrider & Nunez, 2012) while directing one’s gaze to a region of space. Though largely absent from WEIRD communities, such non-manual pointing practices may not be so rare. Lip-pointing in one variant or another appears to be widely distributed, with reports of its use in Southeast Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, Africa, and South America. Should such differences of form be considered surface- level cultural quirks, or do they imply that this foundational building block is more protean than often assumed? Existing Pointing is a foundational building block of human communication, but does it take the same form from one culture to the next? Index finger pointing is often assumed to be universally privileged. Use of non-manual pointing morphologies has been attested around the world but it has never been clear how central these variants are in the communities in which they occur. Using a novel referential communication task, we investigated pointing preferences in two cultures: in the Yupno of Papua New Guinea and in the US. Our task prompted similar rates of pointing in both groups, but the Yupno participants produced more non- manual pointing (nose- and head-pointing) than manual pointing, while the US participants stuck unwaveringly to index finger pointing. The motivation for these starkly contrasting patterns requires further investigation, but it is clear they constitute fundamentally different ways of carrying out one of our most distinctively human communicative acts. Keywords: pointing; reference; communicative universals; human diversity; embodiment; Papua New Guinea Introduction Humans have been influentially described as the “symbolic species” but might just as well be described as the “deictic species.” Evidence of animal pointing in the wild is scarce and contested, but human infants everywhere, sometime before they can speak, start to point for their caretakers. This prelinguistic gesture, an early bodily expression of the drive to orient and share the attention of others, remains a basic communicative tool throughout the lifespan and is deployed in all kinds of everyday activities (Clark, 1996). Such observations have led some researchers to posit a special role for pointing at the dawn of human language (e.g. Tomasello, 2008). Primordial or not, there is little question that pointing constitutes, in the words of one researcher, a “foundational building block of human communication” (Kita, 2003). What form does this building block take and is it the same form from one culture to the next? Despite decades of philosophical and cognitive scientific interest in pointing, there has been surprisingly little systematic empirical work