When we talk to each other, we are using natural language. One of the qualities of natural language is that it is “naturally learnable” — it doesn’t need to be explicitly taught. Nearly 100% of children born into any society will, in the first seven or so years of life, master the grammar, and much of the vocabulary, of that society’s verbal speech.
Written language is something else entirely. Although it might seem to many of us to be essentially the same as verbal speech, it is not naturally learnable. Very few children will spontaneously learn to read and write. Rather, it is a skill that generally needs to be explicitly taught.
Our lab’s research has recently advanced to the point where we can put people into a shared simulation of social “future reality”. We can now (sort of) simulate those futuristic contact lenses which will allow us to graphically augment gesture: Other people will be able to see the shapes that you make in the air with your hands.
So it may at last be possible to find empirical answers to a question I’ve been thinking about for the last seven years or so: Will the shapes that we make in the air end up being more like natural language, or more like written language?
In other words, will the resulting visually enhanced speech evolve toward something that every child will learn, in the normal course of their growth and development? Or will will it be something that needs to be explicitly taught, the way that written language needs to be explicitly taught?
I strongly suspect that it will be a bit of both. In any case, it will be fun to do the research and see what happens.