How The Use of Gestures can Influence Comprehension

 

Co-speech gestures, in terms of recent research and studies, are defined as hand signals and movements that typically pair with spoken language and can express information through their form and movement. The use of gestures in spoken language can be vital to language comprehension, and as shown across many different studies, can support long-term learning, especially when it comes to an individual’s weaker language. Both Elizabeth Wakefield’s research, as well as Eléonore Arbona, Kilian G. Seeber, and Marianne Gullberg’s findings, support the notion that co-speech gestures play a vital role in language comprehension, as well as attaining visual attention.

Within the past year, Cambridge University Press published an article that studied whether the use of co-speech gestures with simultaneous interpreters influenced language comprehension. Through this study, it was found that when participants (both professional interpreters and translators) were exposed to spoken language accompanied by gestures, they were able to understand what was being spoken to them faster than those who were not accompanied by gestures that related back to the speech. “The results suggest that language comprehension is sensitive to the semantic relationship between speech and gesture, and facilitated when speech and gestures are semantically linked. This sensitivity is not modulated by SI or interpreting experience” (Arbona et al., 2023). This highlights that regardless of the skill level of participants, as well as difficulty in the speech being presented, co-speech gestures are vital in language comprehension, and play an important role in the interpretation process.

The research conducted by Elizabeth Wakefield et al. focuses on how co-speech gestures influence language comprehension, specifically in bilingual children. One study conducted in this research was where participants (Polish-English bilingual children) were told a story, one group was presented the story with semantically related gestures, whereas the other group was presented the story without any gestures. It was found through this study that children were able to recall more story points in their weaker language when the story presented was accompanied by semantically related gestures, compared to the children who were told the story without any gestures. Through this, it can be concluded that co-speech gestures can boost language understanding in a person's weaker language, as well as influence one’s attention to confusing spoken language.

Both articles provide essential evidence as well as research to support the overall idea that co-speech gestures used in day-to-day life can be vital in one’s comprehension of the message being conveyed. This spans outside of the topic of bilingualism and translators and can be applied to everyday situations. For example, the use of gestures inside classrooms could potentially influence the attention span of students and help them grasp difficult or confusing topics being taught. Overall, these findings help support that gesture usage can have a positive influence on comprehension and attention.

Resources:

Arbona, E., Seeber, K., & Gullberg, M. (2023). Semantically related gestures facilitate language comprehension during simultaneous interpreting. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(2), 425-439. doi:10.1017/S136672892200058X.

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. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.