Abstract:
In face-to-face interaction people communicate by means of both speech sounds and visible body gestures. Situated linguistic communication is thus characterized by the employment of both the vocal-auditory and the visuospatial modality. Yet, despite extensive investigation of how speech and visible bodily behavior are combined in modern human language, little is known about how vocal and visual signals might have supported the emergence and early evolution of language. In this article, I report on a laboratory experiment which was used to investigate how improvised multimodal signaling can bootstrap communication in the absence of conventionalized language. Contrary to previous literature, the results of the present study show that multimodality has advantages over unimodal gestural signaling in certain scenarios. Ultimately, the findings demonstrate that both the visual and the auditory modality can be fruitfully exploited in scenarios where people communicate devoid of both verbal language and conventionalized non-linguistic signs.
