McLane (1996) described gesturing as a means to communicate an experience. While this might encourage a person to speak, there are times where speech just simply cannot be produced, for example, in situations such as taboo topics or situations where the mind does not have words to express what is intended. Based on the research she conducted on trauma patients, McLane suggests that physical and psychological trauma situations are examples in which communication by speech is challenging. As a result, people may turn to gestures as a way of conveying their message.
The theory of language suggests that people use language as an extension of us due to a need to communicate our experiences, in other words, people have the need to share about things that had happened to them (McLane, 1996). This is what supports communication, as people “communicate to hear and to be heard”. As McLane (1996) had mentioned, “We will say our lives in order to have or live our lives” (p. 107). This quote illustrates that in order to experience life, there is a need to express the experiences.
The Gestural Theory states that human language was developed from gestures that were a primitive form of communication, as opposed to the vocal signals that might have been adopted by non-human primates. According to Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2013), bipedalism might be an influencing factor on gesturing, as walking on two feet allows both hands to be available for gesturing. To date, this theory that hypothesizes that gestures preceded speech in human language remains a popular topic of discussion by both evolutionists and linguists. Numerous anatomical and neurophysiological data have supported the stance that human language had evolved from gestural communication (Paget, 1963; Corballis, 2002; Kimura, 1993).
We will be focusing on the Gestural Theory to further our discussion on gestures in the evolution of language.