On Thursday evening, April 11, our Mercator Fellow Susan Goldin-Meadow gave a talk entitled “The Mind Hidden in Our Hands” at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg.
Susan Goldin-Meadow’s talk explored the versatility of gesture in form and function. She highlighted instances in which gesture can serve as a substitute for speech, embodying the innate properties of language that children themselves bring to language learning and underscoring the resilience of language itself. In other circumstances, gesture can form a fully integrated system with language. When it does, it both predicts and facilitates learning, underscoring the resilience of gesture in thought. Taken together, these lines of research show how much of our mind is hidden in our hands.
By the end of the evening, participants were left with a deeper appreciation for the intricate interplay of gesture and language.