Hand Movements and Nondominant Fluency in Bilinguals

16 subordinate bilingual subjects produced 5-min. monologues in their nondominant languages, i.e., English or Spanish. Hand-movement activity manifested during the videotape monologues was scored and related to measures of fluency in the nondominant language. The hand-movement behavior categorized as Groping Movement was significantly related to all of the nondominant-language fluency measures. These correlations support the assumption that Groping Movement may have a function in the process of verbal encoding. The results are discussed in terms of the possibility of monitoring central cognitive processes through the study of “visible” motor behavior.

[1]  J. Ronch,et al.  Word Naming and Usage Scores for a Sample of Yiddish-English Bilinguals. , 1969 .

[2]  Allen T. Dittmann,et al.  Chapter 7 – The Body Movement-Speech Rhythm Relationship as a Cue to Speech Encoding , 1972 .

[3]  N. Freedman,et al.  Relation of psychopathology and bilingualism to kinesic aspects of interview behavior in schizophrenia. , 1977, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[4]  Maurice H. Krout,et al.  An Experimental Attempt to Produce Unconscious Manual Symbolic Movements , 1954 .

[5]  A. Dittmann,et al.  Body movement and speech rhythm in social conversation. , 1969, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  N. Freedman,et al.  Body Movement and Verbal Encoding in the Congenitally Blind , 1974, Perceptual and motor skills.

[7]  John Macnamara,et al.  The linguistic independence of bilinguals , 1967 .

[8]  N. Freedman,et al.  Communicative Structures and Psychic Structures , 1977, The Downstate Series of Research in Psychiatry and Psychology.

[9]  R. L. Cooper,et al.  Alternative Measures of Bilingualism. , 1969 .

[10]  N. Freedman,et al.  Chapter 8 – The Analysis of Movement Behavior During the Clinical Interview1 , 1972 .

[11]  L. R. Marcos.  Linguistic dimensions in the bilingual patient , 1976, American journal of psychoanalysis.

[12]  N. Freedman,et al.  Communicative behavior in schizophrenia. The relation of adaptive styles to kinetic and linguistic aspects of interview behavior. , 1975, The Journal of nervous and mental disease.

[13]  E. Holst.  Relations between the central Nervous System and the peripheral organs , 1954 .

[14]  H. A. Witkin,et al.  The imprint of psychological differentiation on kinetic behavior in varying communicative contexts. , 1972, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[15]  N. Freedman.  Hands, Words, and Mind: On the Structuralization of Body Movements During Discourse and the Capacity for Verbal Representation , 1977 .

[16]  A. Scheflen.  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF POSTURE IN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS. , 1964, Psychiatry.

[17]  N. Freedman,et al.  Kinetic Behavior in Altered Clinical States: Approach to Objective Analysis of Motor Behavior during Clinical Interviews , 1967, Perceptual and motor skills.

[18]  R. L. Cooper,et al.  Word Frequency Estimation as a Measure of Degree of Bilingualism , 1969 .

[19]  M. Kesselman,et al.  The effect of interview language on the evaluation of psychopathology in Spanishh-American schizophrenic patients. , 1973, The American journal of psychiatry.

[20]  N. Freedman,et al.  A Study of the Representation of Objects in Schizophrenia , 1973, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

[21]  L. R. Marcos.  Bilinguals in psychotherapy: language as an emotional barrier. , 1976, American journal of psychotherapy.

[22]  F. Quitkin,et al.  Body movements and the verbal encoding of aggressive affect. , 1973, Journal of personality and social psychology.