Impact of Gesturing

    Gesturing is a powerful phenomenon that has a more significant effect than what is usually recognized. Whether people are using it to teach or have a friendly conversation, it allows the listeners to be more engaged and have a visual sense of what is being told. Gesturing while speaking has a large effect on developing children and adults. 

    Elizabeth Wakefield did a study on how gesturing can help learners learn. She did this by taking 50 kids ages 8 to 10. An eye tracker was set for each participant with the control group and experimental group. The control group are the members that watched the problem with no gestures and the experimental group watched with gesturing occurring. It was founded that in the post-test, the experimental group did better than the control group. It was also founded that the experimental group would watch the problem and gesture space more while in the control group, they would look at the problem and also focus on the instructor. Using gestures while teaching helps people gain a better understanding of what is being taught.

    A study was done by Goldin-Meadow on how gesturing is able to have an impact on optical illusions. This study contained of 45 people, and they would inspect Müller- Lyer illusion. It was founded that 32 of the members that were hearing used gestures while speaking and 13 members that are classified as deaf and used American Sign Language to converse about the sticks. According to the data, the illusion became less compelling when participants were using gestures to explain the illusion. 

    With both these studies, it can be seen that gesturing is able to have an impact when it comes to comparison and learning. It is impactful of trying to figure something out whether it's solving a problem or figuring out how an optical illusion is able to work. From both, it can be determined that gesturing is able to help the brain have a better understanding of what is going on and what is trying to be processed. When speech and gesturing processing occur at the same time, the brain is able to have a visual and verbal reference which can be a factor on how it's able to cause a better understanding, which occurred for the math problem and the optical illusion. All in all, gesturing can be powerful for both the developing brain and fully grown people. 

Works Cited