Co-speech gestures are hand movements that generally go along with the meaning of spoken words. They can be used to enhance the learning of material and communication between people. Though these types of gestures have only recently begun to be investigated, they have been utilized for generations. According to Charles Darwin, emotional expressions, such as speech gestures, have been vital to our survival. It’s known that language is better understood when accompanied by a gesture, and this observation is even more prominent in children.
Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth M. Wakefield studied co-speech gestures in their research article, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism”. Specifically, Zielinski and Wakefield investigated the role of speech gestures on memory/recall of a story and on the extent of visual attention. They were specifically interested in the differences between bilingual children whose primary language is English and whose secondary is Polish. In the study, they showed 17 bilingual children two videos of a person telling a story, one of which was in English and the other in Polish, both with either matched or mismatched gestures. When asked to recall the story, they found that children had a more difficult time recalling a story in English – their primary language – that was paired with mismatched gestures and showed no improvement or a decline in memory when recalling a story in Polish that was paired with mismatched gestures. This evidence helped to conclude that speech paired with matched gestures significantly improves a child’s memory in their second language compared to their first – an example of cognitive learning facilitated by speech gestures.
In another article, “Exploring the Emotional Functions of Co-Speech Hand Gesture in Language and Communication”, Spencer D. Kelly and Quang-Anh Ngo Tan educate about the effects of co-speech gestures in regards to not only cognitive but emotional learning, as well. After gathering and evaluating information across studies, these authors claim that co-speech gestures play a positive role in language acquisition, speech formulation, concept learning, and problem solving. In addition to these cognitive abilities, they claim that gestures also facilitate expression and comprehension of emotional meaning. Studies conducted by Goldin-Meadow, McNeill, and Kendon were referenced often. For example, Goldin-Meadow conducted an investigation showing the link between language acquisition and gestures in early childhood. Specifically, she provided evidence that children in the one-word stage showed more knowledge of gestures than they did spoken words and once the two modalities caught up to each other, they were typically used to supplement one another. Another researcher, McNeill shows the link between gestures and moral/emotional expression when he describes an example where people use their left and right hand to distinguish the concept of good or bad.
Both of these articles provide evidence that co-speech gestures facilitate cognitive learning in some way, while the second article provides further evidence of how gestures also facilitate emotional learning. As the first article dives deeper into how gestures help bilingual children, specifically, comprehend language in their second language, the second article is more of a meta-analysis that connects the cognitive and emotional roles of speech gestures. The evidence analyzed in the second article might also help to explain the effects of co-speech gestures seen in the first article. Maybe the children who were able to recall more of the story also had some sort of emotional connection to the speaker who provided gestures. All in all, these two articles together show how co-speech gestures facilitate cognitive and emotional learning and how the two are intertwined.
References
Kelly, S. D., & Ngo Tran, Q. (2023). Exploring the emotional functions of CO‐speech hand gesture in language and communication. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12657
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021, July 19). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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