When referring to things in the world, speakers produce utterances that are composites of speech and action. Pointing gestures are a pervasive part of such composite utterances, but many questions remain about exactly how pointing is integrated with speech. In this dissertation I present three strands of research that investigate relations of different kinds between pointing and language. A first strand investigates the relationship between pointing gestures and spoken demonstratives, such as this and that in English. Linguists, philosophers, and psychologists have long noted the pointing-demonstrative relationship but have not yet characterized it with any precision. At the same time, cross-disciplinary controversy about the meaning of demonstratives has intensified. I present findings from two studies using a referential communication task, which suggest that demonstrative use may hinge on pointing in previously unappreciated ways. A second strand of research presents an exploratory investigation of a commonplace but ignored class of pointing: gestures that speakers direct toward their own bodies. An analysis was carried out of body- directed gestures in a corpus of one-on-one interviews, resulting in a typology of three types of body-directed gestures-- self-points, body-points, and body-anchors. Each type is considered in turn, with a focus on basic questions about how, when, and why such gestures are produced. The third strand considers cross-cultural differences in pointing and the question of what motivates these differences. A case study is presented of a previously undocumented facial pointing gesture-- nose- pointing-- used by the Yupno, an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea. Based on examples of pointing and non-pointing uses of the form, we propose that facial gesture is linked to a particular semantic theme, and discuss how this link is both iconically motivated and shaped by features of Yupno language and communicative practice. Together these different strands of research contribute to our understanding of pointing as both a window into processes of conceptualization and a cornerstone of human social interaction. The findings presented offer new insights into the disparate forces-- biomechanics, grammar, conceptual structure, and cultural practices-- that give this cornerstone shape

Units as they exist today are highly abstract. Meters, miles, and other modern measures have no obvious basis in concrete phenomena and can apply to anything, anywhere. We show here, however, that units have not always been this way. Focusing on length, we first analyze the origins of length units in the Oxford English Dictionary; next, we review ethnographic observations about length measurement in 111 cultures. Our survey shows that length units have overwhelmingly come from concrete sources—body parts, artifacts, and other tangible phenomena—and are often tied to particular contexts. We next propose a reconstruction of how abstract units might have emerged gradually over cultural time through processes of comparison. Evidence from how children understand length and measurement provides support for this account. The case of units offers a powerful illustration of how some of our most important, pervasive abstractions can arise from decidedly concrete, often embodied origins.

Sensitivity to the causal structure underlying phenomena iscritical to expert understanding. Fostering such understandingin learners is therefore a key goal in education. Wehypothesized that observing analogical gestures—whichrepresent relational information in visuospatial format—would lead learners to notice and reason about underlyingcausal patterns, such as positive and negative feedback.Participants watched brief video lectures about the humanbody and the plant kingdom, which were delivered along withgestures representing either: 1) visuospatial details (iconicgesture condition); or 2) relational structure (analogicalgesture condition). In a subsequent classification task, relativeto participants who saw iconic gestures, participants who sawanalogical gestures were more likely to sort the phenomenadescribed in the videos—as well as novel phenomena—bytheir causal structure (e.g., positive feedback). The resultssuggest that analogical gestures can be harnessed to fostercausal understanding.

When speakers gesture, their gestures shape their thoughts, but how this happens remains unclear. What kinds of feedback from gesture—visual, proprioceptive, or both— drive these cognitive effects? Here we address this question using a test bed previously employed to explore gesture’s cognitive effects (Beilock & Goldin-Meadow, 2010). Participants solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, explained their solutions in speech and gesture, and solved the puzzle a second time. Previous studies using this paradigm have demonstrated that the gestures participants produce during the explanation phase affect their ability to solve the problem the second time. Unlike these prior studies, however, participants in the present study were blocked from seeing their hands while they gestured. Despite this absence of visual feedback, our results replicate previous studies in which visual feedback was available. These findings suggest that gesture may shape thought through proprioceptive feedback alone.

When talking about abstract relations like better and worse, people often use gestures arrayed in space to get their pointacross. But are these analogical gestures solely communicative props that make abstract content more accessible for listen-ers, or do they also reflect an integral part of reasoning? To address this question, we investigated whether people wouldproduce analogical gestures outside of a communicative context. In a linear syllogism task, participants spontaneouslygestured on 52.4% of trials on average; most participants (87.5%) gestured on at least one trial. Trials involving spatialrelational terms prompted more gestures per trial than those with non-spatial terms (spatial: M = 2.87; non-spatial: M =2.29; F(1, 23) = 7.62, p = .011). Analogical gestures thus do occur outside of communicative contexts, suggesting thatthey serve to aid the reasoning process itself. An in-progress follow-up study replicates and extends these findings.