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COMMUNICATION

Gestures speak volumes, and new research suggests that nonverbal
communication may be more intuitive and important than experts previously
believed.

While a speaker's movements may help a listener understand him or
her more easily, according to two new studies conducted by Jana Iverson,
Ph.D., an assistant psychology professor at the University of Missouri,
nonverbal communication is just as useful for the speaker. In her first
study, published recently in Nature, she asked a group of blind children
aged 8 to 18 to perform two tasks--give directions and talk about the
quantifies of water in two differently shaped containers--to both sighted
and blind adults. Upon observing the participants, Iverson made a
significant discovery: The children used the same number of gestures
regardless of whom they were speaking to, suggesting that hand gestures
are a "fundamental part of communication," Iverson says. "It's not
something we learn."

In a follow-up study, scheduled for publication in the Journal of
Non Verbal Behavior, Iverson demonstrated that all children gesture
before they learn to speak--sighted children more frequently than blind
children. According to Iverson, hand gestures appear to supplement words,
allowing people to express themselves more thoroughly and clearly. They
"tell us something about the way we think," she explains, and that "there
are aspects of our thinking that are more imagistic. Gestures give us a
way to communicate those aspects of our thoughts that can't very well be
put into words."

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