Glenn David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States)[1] is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.
[2][3][4] McNeill studied for and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1962, both in psychology, at the University of California, Berkeley.
[2][5] In 2004, the National-Louis University (a multi-campus institution in Chicago) Office of Institutional Management Grants Center received an American Psychological Association Grant for Gale Stam Psychology College of Arts and Sciences to provide "a Festschrift conference honoring Professor David McNeill of the University of Chicago.
"[6] McNeill specializes in psycholinguistics, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.
The "growth point" is a key theoretical concept in McNeill's approach to psycholinguistics and is central to his work on gestures, specifically those spontaneous and unwitting hand movements that regularly accompany informal speech.
[7][8][9] McNeill argues that thought is multimodal: both vocal-linguistic and manual-gestural, and the resulting semiotic opposition fuels change.
Gestures, when they combine, do not form what Ferdinand de Saussure terms syntagmatic values; they paint a more elaborate picture but contain nothing corresponding to the emerging syntagmatic value of a noun as a direct object when combined with a verb ("hit the ball", where "ball", by itself, is not a direct object).
McNeill furthers this conception of the material carrier by turning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for insight into the duality of gesture and language.
[emphasis in the original][11] For McNeill, the GP is a mechanism geared to this "existential significance" of speech, this "taking up a position in the world".
A deeper answer to the query, therefore-–when we see a gesture, what are we seeing?--is that we see part of the speaker's current cognitive being, "her very mental existence", at the moment it occurs.
To make a gesture, from this perspective, is to bring thought into existence on a concrete plane, just as writing out a word can have a similar effect.
The widely popular "gesture-first" theory, according to which language began as pure gesture without speech, fails this test.
Mead's Loop and the mirror neuron "twist" would be naturally selected in scenarios where sensing one's own actions as social is advantageous.
For example, in imparting information to infants, where it gives the adult the sense of being an instructor as opposed to being just a doer with an onlooker, as is the case with chimpanzees.
McNeill considers that when something emerges in current-day ontogenesis only at a certain stage of development, the original natural selection of the feature (if there was any) might have taken place in a similar psychological milieu in phylogenesis.