11 Facts About David McNeill

David McNeill is a professor of the University of Chicago in Illinois, and a writer.

David McNeill went on to study at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University in 1963.

In 1995, McNeill won the Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, University of Chicago; and in 1995 he was awarded the Gordon J Laing Award from the University of Chicago Press for the book Hand and Mind.

David McNeill specializes in psycholinguistics, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.

For David McNeill, gestures are in effect the speaker's thought in action, and integral components of speech, not merely accompaniments or additions.

David McNeill argues that thought is multimodal: both vocal-linguistic and manual-gestural, and the resulting semiotic opposition fuels change.

David McNeill employs the concept of "material carriers", a phrase used by Vygotsky to refer to the embodiment of meaning in enactments or material experiences to further develop the concepts of Mead's Loop and the GP.

For David McNeill, the GP is a mechanism geared to this "existential significance" of speech, this "taking up a position in the world".

An alternative, which David McNeill calls "Mead's Loop" after the philosopher George Herbert Mead, explains this unity.

David McNeill considers that when something emerges in current-day ontogenesis only at a certain stage of development, the original natural selection of the feature might have taken place in a similar psychological milieu in phylogenesis.

David McNeill's books have received coverage in a number of academic journals and in the general press.