1 The experiment reported compared human participants' ability to bootstrap a communication

2 system using communication mediums that differ in the opportunity they afford for motivated
3 sign use. Communication by gesture was more accurate and more efficient than communication
4 by non-linguistic vocalization. Indeed, performance in the gesture condition is comparable to that
5 of speakers who use their existing language system to communicate abstract shapes (Schober &
6 Clark, 1989). When participants were allowed to combine non-linguistic vocalization with
7 gesture, their performance (accuracy and time) was no better than with gesture alone, indicating
8 that gesture was responsible for participants' communication success. We believe that
9 participants performed better in the gesture condition (compared to the non-linguistic
10 vocalization condition) because gesture better lends itself to the production of motivated signs.
11 For example, to communicate the item “fruit,” a director pantomimed the peeling and eating of a
12 banana (an iconic gesture). This type of structure mapping between a sign and its referent is not
13 so readily available to non-linguistic vocalization (where iconic and motivated signs are limited to
14 onomatopoeia and sound symbolism).

15 While non-linguistic vocalization was less effective than gesture, it did support above chance
16 performance for each category of items (where chance is 4.17%, i.e., 1 divided by 24
17 experimental items). In addition, in this condition particular categories of items were more
18 successfully communicated than others: Emotion items were better communicated than action
19 items and actions items were better communicated than object items. This pattern of results is
20 informative. Emotions and actions lend themselves to indexical forms of non-linguistic
21 communication, that is, communication based on the natural associations between an item and a
22 sound (e.g., imitating a yawn to communicate “tired” or simulating a snore to communicate
23 “sleeping”). Similar findings are reported in studies that look at people's use of non-linguistic
24 vocalization to communicate emotions (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010) and human
25 movements (Kantartzis, Imai, & Kita, 2011). Such indexical relationships are less apparent
26 between non-linguistic vocalization and objects (e.g., it is difficult to think of a sound that is
27 naturally associated with “rock”). Hence, participants' poorer performance when communicating
28 items from the object category.

29 Although our study was conducted among modern-day humans (with modern brains and mastery
30 of at least one spoken language), our results may “speak” to vocal and gestural theories of the
31 origin of language (Arbib, 2005; Cheney & Seyfarth, 2005; Corballis, 2003; MacNeilage, 1998).
32 If one accepts that any feature that helped establish language (such as the use of motivated signs)
33 would not have been discarded during the later evolution of the species (p. 384, Deacon, 1997),
34 then our results suggest an important role for gesture. That (modern) people of all cultures
35 gesture while they speak is testament to the naturalness and continued use of gesture
36 (Feyereisen & de Lannoy, 1991). However, we do not rule out a role for non-linguistic
37 vocalization. Interestingly, participants in the combined condition often supplemented their
38 gestures with vocalizations (vocalizations were combined with gestures on 25% of trials on
39 Games 1–6), even though vocalization never replaced gesture (i.e., participants never used
40 vocalization without also using gesture). Thus, rather than commit to a gestural origin, we prefer
41 an origin in which humans initially communicated using motivated signs (icons and indices),
42 whether gestural or vocal (i.e., a multimodal origin; see Pollick & de Waal, 2007 for evidence of
43 multimodality in ape communication). Grounding a basic set of shared meanings in this way,
44 during the very earliest stages of language, could then pave the way for the further expansion of
45 the lexicon.