Gesture is a common utilization in speech, to describe and elaborate on what is being said verbally. It may even come so naturally to us that we don’t realize the extent of the impact it has on our communication. In children, gestures are subconsciously used to enhance memory and learning in the long term. It is believed that the mental mechanisms of learning, speech, and gesture are all related to each other in intricate and important ways.
For the research article “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” by Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth Wakefield, a study was completed that tested how much the addition of gesture benefitted a listener, based on age and language proficiency. The subjects, 17 bilingual children between the ages of six and eight, were read a story in one of two languages -- English or Polish -- which was accompanied by no gesture, matched gesture, or mismatched gesture. Matched gesture is redundant with speech, essentially repeating what was said, but in gesture. Mismatched gesture is gesture that provides additional information to what was said, rather than information found in the speech. The children were then asked to reproduce the story points, which produced quantifiable recall scores. The results of the study show that all of the children, who were reported as being more proficient in English, remembered the most English story points without gesture, and the most Polish story points were remembered when in conjunction with matched gesture. In the language with lower proficiency, the kids used the gesture to help determine the meaning of what was being said. This shows that gesture deeply benefits language learning.
In a New York Times article recently released called “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” by Sonia Shah, a very similar idea is addressed. An important part of the article addresses Cat Hobaiter, a scientist who works with great apes, some of our closest living relatives, and studies the gestures of her subjects. In the gestures recorded between the great apes she studies, a decently high amount are actually legible to us humans. Hobaiter has used her study techniques on pre-verbal children, toddlers of one or two years of age, and found 40-50 matching gestures that indicated the same, or very similar meanings between species. She also put videos of ape gestures online for adult humans to try to decode or define, and the correct responses from people was found at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance”, as Hobaiter and her fellows reported in a paper for PLOS Biology.
Though these articles address different species, and different reasons for gesture, they match in the idea that gesture is subconscious, and has legitimate meaning in use. Whether gesture is the main source of communication, or just an additional resource, research from around the world is concluding that gesture plays an important role in communication.
Sources
Shah, Sonia. “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/magazine/animal-communication.html.
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). 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, 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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