We are doing research about a gesture system called Visual Phonics. The hand shapes, corresponding to sounds, can be useful in literacy instruction with young children, both with and without disabilities. The individual hand shapes are fairly abstract initially, but, with repetition, do take on meaning. Does this indicate a shift from one type of gesture to another?
No. Iconic symbols must be perceptually similar to their targets (possibly in a broad way) and presumably at least partly understandable out of context. When an abstract symbol takes on a conventionalised meaning it does not change its nature.
It's a the other way around, Jeffrey. All metaphoric gestures are iconic for their source domain and metaphoric for their target domain (See George Lakoff on metaphor). So the source domain for representing having an idea as holding out your cupped hand is holding things and the target domain is thinking thoughts. That gesture belongs, as Lakoff puts it, to a large family of metaphors about thinking in which ideas are objects, hands (or heads) are containers. Gestural metaphorics (in David McNeill's term) participate in the same metaphorical system as linguistic metaphors.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Artificial Intelligence