What concepts and words do communicative gestures activate in the minds of people who view them? It’s widely believed that many gestures grow from iconic origins—they look like what they mean—but also that at some point they may become emblematic—conventionalized as culturally agreed-upon symbols. How long do links between physical movements of the body and the things in the world they denote persist in the minds of gesture-users? A pair of experiments asks this question for the Middle-Finger, a cross-culturally recognized obscene gesture. The prevailing view is that the gesture originates in a phallic symbol. Yet it is now predominantly used as an emblematic gesture displaying contempt (among other things). It is currently unknown whether the iconic origins of gestures persist through the emblematic stage in the minds of gesture users. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that viewing the Middle-Finger primes thoughts about penises or the word penis. The results showed that the Middle-Finger induced no priming of penis compared with control, unlike another obscene penis-representing gesture (Finger-Bang), which did. This suggests that the Middle-Finger no longer activates thoughts of penises in the minds of contemporary American English speakers. Emblematic gestures with iconic origins may undergo historical change not just in the functions they serve but also in the effects they have on the minds of people who use them.

Introduction

Across cultures and languages, humans use communicative gestures to accompany and replace speech [1]. These gestures vary in terms of their iconicity [2]. Iconic gestures directly reflect aspects of what they denote through their articulated, visible form, as in pantomime. But many gestures with iconic origins transition over time into emblematic gestures [3]. Emblematic gestures, like Thumbs-Up or A-OK, have culturally agreed-upon forms and functions; they can replace words and often have conventional labels. But it is currently unknown, as a gesture’s function changes, whether it also loses its iconic links in the minds of the humans who use it. Emblematic gestures might be bereft of iconic associations for language users—acting as arbitrary conventionalized symbols. Alternatively, iconic associations might survive the transition to emblematicity—in principle, a gesture might both have a culturally agreed-upon form and function, and yet still retain iconic associations to its original basis in the minds of users. The two experiments below ask, for one emblematic gesture, whether its original iconic basis is lost once it transitions to an emblem.

Iconic and emblematic gestures Iconic gestures are defined by homology between their form and their denotational meaning or function [2]. These include gestures representing physical objects, motion, or positioning in space, where features of the gesture’s articulation (hand shape, position, movement, etc.) resemble features of the denotation. For instance, using an open palm to represent the oscillating trajectory of a falling leaf would be iconic inasmuch as the shape, orientation, or motion of the hand are homologous to those of the leaf is depicts. Iconic gestures have been the object of substantial interest in gesture research in part because they contrast with the majority of the spoken language that they accompany, which is predominantly non-iconic. Iconic gestures appear to play a special role in development [4]. They may also be useful for speakers in retrieving intended words during speech [5]. Comprehenders integrate them with accompanying language in the construction of mental representations of described objects, like the shape, size, orientation, or trajectory [6–9]. And they also use it to disambiguate speech [10]. For instance, a gesture accompanying the expression double doors may successfully disambiguate whether the speaker intends side-by-side French doors or stacked Dutch doors. Contrasting with iconic gestures, at least in their broad strokes [11], are emblematic ones. Emblematic gestures usually have conventional labels, and can appear without speech or can even replace speech. Familiar examples are the Thumbs-Up gesture (closed fist with thumb extended upwards), the Peace gesture (index and middle finger spread with palm oriented away from the body), or the Middle-Finger gesture. Some emblematic gestures vary substantially across cultures. For instance, the A-OK gesture, signifies “OK” in English-speaking contexts but is an obscene gesture in Brazil [2]. Others are more consistent cross-culturally, like gestures pointing to the eye, which reliably encode either an exhortation to or promise of alertness [12]. Emblematic gestures have been argued to often derive from iconic origins. For instance Kendon [13] argues that iconic gestures can be conventionalized as part of a culturally agreed upon code. And indeed, as McNeill argues [3], although the iconicity may no longer play an essential role in determining the gesture’s function (it has become a conventionalized component of a cultural code), nevertheless the iconic element may remain. For instance, the Finger-Cross retains spatial iconicity to the Christian cross, despite its emblematicity. Yet these characterizations of gestural iconicity are determined analytically, through ad-hoc descriptions of analyst-perceived similarity. It is currently unknown what their cognitive status is. Are the iconic origins of iconic and emblematic gestures retained as active associations in the minds of gesture users? It is possible in principle that emblematic gestures, even those with preserved iconic forms, nevertheless no longer activate their iconic source in the minds of comprehenders when viewed. Indeed, to the extent that they are treated as primarily symbolic acts, emblematic gestures might directly activate their denotation or function, and their original iconicity may be irrelevant to processing. Alternatively, it is possible that gestures preserve iconic associations even when they become emblematic. This possibility is consistent with a body of work showing that iconicity plays a role in word processing, even when words are fully conventionalized symbols in a lexicon [14]. We address this question using a particularly noteworthy emblematic gesture, the Middle-Finger.