Shreejata Gupta

1 Introduction Across cultures and age groups, we all gesture while speaking (Hewes 1974). These co-speech gestures play a crucial role in enhancing communication, either by complementing the spoken message or conveying information that is not expressed through speech alone (Goldin-Meadow 1999). They also facilitate speech comprehension (Kelly et al. 2015) and shape social interactions (Holler and Levinson 2019; Clark 1996).

Abstract Compositionality, a hallmark of human language, involves generating novel meaning by combining existing units. Nonhuman primates (mostly apes) are known to combine gestural units in non-random ways, but they do not make novel meaning with these combinations. What could, however, be the functional roles of these gesture sequences and whether they bear any significance in relation to language evolution is still unclear.