Abstract
The origin of language has been a mystery for many years, with many possible theories offered as an explanation. One of the strongest theories states that human spoken language originated after the development of a gestural communication system. An important question in this theory is how these gestures developed, and how they became symbolic. Research within experimental semiotics has studied the process of simplification within emerging language systems, but most research has examined graphical systems and not gestures. The current research fills this gap by experimentally studying the process of simplification with iconic gestures. Ten pairs of participants were asked to use only bodily gesture to convey the meaning of a word to their partner. Concepts were repeated six times, allowing for the analysis of simplification over those representations. In addition, following Merola (2007) and Poggi (2008), four types of words (actions, animate creatures, natural objects, and artefacts) were provided in order to test the sorts of gestures that were used to convey iconic meaning. The results show that the number of component gestures used to convey the concept reduced over the first three iterations, after which they remained stable. In addition, there was a significant relationship between the type of meaning to be conveyed and the type of gesture employed. The thesis concludes examining the sorts of components that were employed and how simplification progressed in order to set up future research on the topic of emergent gesture-based communication systems.