One of the most distinct ways that make human beings uniquely different from other organisms is in the way that we communicate and share information with each other. Our ability to use language takes on many forms, such as through speech or through the written word, and is used for many different reasons, one of the most important being learning information from one another. In the field of neuroscience, there is still very little understanding of the way that humans communicate and use language with each other. One of the reasons is that there isn’t yet a way to study how other species communicate that would be similar enough to accurately apply it to our use of language. However, there have been recent findings on the way humans learn through language, and this research suggests that part of the answer to the mystery of language is in our hands.
Many findings of how humans communicate come from research on how we learn as children, which is a heavily researched topic in the field of developmental psychology. Dr. Wakefield’s research gives us more information on the significance of using hand movements when learning new concepts. In this study, eye-tracking data was collected between a pretest and posttest from children while they watched a video of a teacher explaining how to solve a math problem. Half of the children watched a video in which the teacher stood and used speech alone to solve the math problem, and the other half watched a video where the teacher used hand gestures to point out different parts of the equation while using the same speech as the other video. After analyzing the eye-tracking data and comparing posttest results, it was found that children tended to focus their visual attention on the math problem shown in the video when hand gestures were used (Wakefield et. al., 2018). The researchers used this data to infer that gestures affected the relationship between speech and visual information and that children were able to better apply the teacher’s directions to the task of solving the math problem when gestures were used.
The effect of using gestures while communicating on how we learn has been shown to apply across different subjects in various languages. A news article titled “How Certain Gestures Help you Learn New Words” reports the findings of a study from the Journal of Neuroscience that gives us more information on the role that gestures can play in learning a new language. In the study, German-speaking participants were asked to learn a list of made-up vocabulary words and memorize their meanings along with the gestures that accompanied those meanings. Five months after learning them, participants were tested to see if they remembered the vocabulary list and their meanings while the experimenters sent interfering signals to their primary motor cortex via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The participants found it harder to remember the words when there were signals being sent to the motor cortex and easier to remember when they weren’t, which suggests that the primary motor cortex played a role in remembering new, foreign words (Mathias et. al., 2021).
The significance of gestures in learning concepts and communicating with each other is important to consider if we want to figure out what makes the way that humans use language so unique and how language is connected in our brains. How we associate words and concepts with one another in our brains is still very unknown, but these findings on the role of gestures in language could imply that in many cases, using our hands could be one of the middle pieces that connect words and concepts with each other and allow us to understand and remember what they mean. Further research can dive more deeply into how the motor cortex and other regions of the brain can work together in developing our ability to use gestures in our language.
Works Cited
Gelitz, C. (2021, November 12). How certain gestures help you learn new words. Scientific American. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-certain-gestures-help-you-learn-new-words/
Mathias, B., Waibel, A., Hartwigsen, G., Sureth, L., Macedonia, M., Mayer, K. M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2021). Motor cortex causally contributes to vocabulary translation following sensorimotor-enriched training. The Journal of Neuroscience, 41(41), 8618–8631. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2249-20.2021
Wakefield, Elizabeth, et al. “Gesture Helps Learners Learn, but Not Merely by Guiding Their Visual Attention.” Developmental Science, vol. 21, no. 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12664.
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