superlinguo:

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

The OC has jokes about what goes down in the Friday meetings.

Football is a game, but the NFL is a business - and one that requires a lot of hours for both the players and coaches.

Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith is no different. He and Russell Wilson have weekly meetings on Friday nights that sometimes run late into the evening as they prepare for their next opponent. Smith made note of those meetings, and said that his wife FaceTimes him to make sure he’s behaving himself.

“We spend so many hours [working], sometimes my wife FaceTimes me to make sure I’m not somewhere on the South Side,” Smith said. “I’m in my office. Look, there’s Russ.”

Wilson was asked about the Friday meetings and shared what he tells his wife when conversations about long hours occur.

“They know how much we love this game,” Wilson said. “For us, we always say to them ‘You guys like touchdowns, right?’”

Smith and Wilson have been a great pairing thus far, as the Steelers are 3-0 with Wilson under center and 10th in EPA per play since Wilson took over the starting job. They will need to be explosive offensively on Sunday to defeat the Ravens and take a firm grasp of first place in the AFC North.

For the first 40 plus years of its existence, the Capitol was lit by candles and whale-oil lamps, including an absolute monster of a chandelier that had briefly hung in the House chamber. Its almost immediate destruction gave Congress the idea that a new way of lighting their workspace was needed. Fortunately, there was, as there so often is, someone with an idea.

His name was James Crutchett, and he was born in England in 1816. In the early 1840s, he patented a new of manufacturing gas, and then for reasons unknown, decided to move to the United States. He was mainly active in the Midwest, including filing a patent for his system while living in Cincinnati.

In 1845, Crutchett moved to Washington, buying a house just north of the Capitol. He fitted it out with a gas plant and succeeded in making his house the first private house illuminated by gas in Washington.

The gas production was described in a November, 1847, article in the Washington Daily Union:

It produces crude gas rapidly from the commonest crude oil of animals, mineral, or vegetable substances affording it. Thus, common whale oil, or foot, cottonseed-oil, &c. – grease from any source – supply the material. On passing through the cylinders, which are heated to redness, all impurities other than carburetted hydrogen are separated in the most simple manner, and fitted for transit into the gas-holder, where the gas passes by virtue of the pressure under which it is generated.

From here, he branched out, selling his system to a local hotel.

His real prize was the Capitol, however, and in January 1847, he contacted Congress and suggested they use his system to light up their building – as well as the grounds around it. Two months later, Congress appropriated the money to add gas lighting to the Capitol, but with a caveat – Crutchett has to prove himself first. He chose the most outrageous way of doing it – by building a 92-foot mast on the top of the Capitol dome with a light at the top that would light up the whole Capitol grounds.

Unsurprisingly, Congress was skeptical. They asked Benjamin Brown French, Clerk of the House or Representatives, to inspect the plans, and to see that adding this mast would not damage the dome. French (that’s him, above) pulled in Joseph Henry (of the Smithsonian) Robert Mills (architect of the Washington Monument) and William Renwick (who had designed the Smithsonian Castle)

All experts agreed that the mast would not be a problem, and so the work began, sourcing the pole from Pennsylvania, while the lantern for the top was made locally. Meanwhile, a new gas plant was built just northwest of the Capitol. It was described by the Daily Union:

The water-tank, receiving the gas-holder, being surmounted with a beautiful massive granite stone, (curbstone,) having six iron pillars around it, supporting a cornice, all bronzed – giving it a neat finish, and making it an ornament to that part of the Capitol heretofore the repository of coal, wood, &c.

Sadly, picture of this ‘ornament’ exists, just this rather opaque description.

Next week: The lantern above the Capitol.

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