Gesture
A movement of the body, especially the hands, that communicates meaning without necessarily forming part of a language.
Emblem (gesture): A conventional gesture with a stable meaning that can stand alone as a message. Emblems such as a thumbs-up communicate recognizable meanings without spoken words.
Kinesics: The study of body movement and its role in communication. Kinesics provides a framework for describing gesture as communicative movement.
Sign language: A natural language that uses visual-manual forms, including handshapes, movement, and facial grammar. Unlike gestures outside language, signs in a sign language participate in a structured linguistic system.
Deaf culture: The cultures and communities shaped by shared sign languages, histories, and social practices among Deaf people. Gesture and visual communication are central to many Deaf social settings, alongside fully developed sign languages.
Gesture studies: An interdisciplinary field examining gesture's forms, meanings, development, and use. This field brings linguistic, psychological, anthropological, and historical approaches to gesture together.
Facial expression: A configuration of facial movements that signals emotion, intention, or other information. Facial movements combine with hand and body gestures to shape a message.
Proxemics: The study of how people use interpersonal distance and space. A gesture's meaning can shift with the distance and spatial arrangement between people.
Pantomime: The representation of actions, objects, or events through bodily movement without speech. Pantomime overlaps with gesture but typically builds extended, depictive scenes.
Co-speech gesture: A bodily movement produced alongside speech that contributes to the utterance's meaning or emphasis. These gestures reveal how bodily movement works together with spoken language in conversation.
David McNeill: An American psycholinguist known for research on gesture and its relation to speech and thought. McNeill developed influential accounts of how gesture and speech form an integrated system.