IF KIM JONG IL plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush’s. For irrespective of their native tongue’s sentence structure, people communicate non-verbally in the same way.
Some languages build sentences using a subject-verb-object order: mice eat cheese. Others, such as Korean, use an order more like “mice cheese eat”.
Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago and her colleagues found that most people, regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, use the subject-object-verb construction to communicate with gestures (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 9163), suggesting that this sentence structure is etched on the human brain.
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