Implementing Co-Speech gestures to help neurogenic disorders.

    Co-speech gestures are the non-verbal expressions and movements that assist speech, playing a crucial role in improving our understanding of language. Gesture is frequently seen as secondary in spoken language, gaining less attention within language research. Through recent studies implementing hand gestures has been shown to increase language comprehension while also forming long-term memory and knowledge, leading to new findings that involve gesture to help in brain disorder therapy.

    

    In the research article, "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism" Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth M. Wakefield presented the study of co-speech gesture. Specifically, how hand movement and gestures influence language proficiency in bilingual children. Through visual attention, children whose primary language is English and whose secondary language is Polish were given two videos of someone telling a story in English and Polish with both matched or mismatched gestures. They were asked to recall the story based on their memory. Through this study, they found that children have a harder time recalling the story in English even though it was their first language and had matched gestures. On the other hand, the children had no issue when recalling the story in Polish although it was presented with mismatched gestures. Overall, body language and gestures boost memory for story points in weaker language compared to stronger language and help better comprehend what is being communicated to them. 

     Considering the benefits of hand movements and comprehension of speech in Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth M. Wakefield's study, there are other benefits of how gesture can also play a part in improving those with neurogenic communication disorders. In the article, "The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implications for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders," Sharice Clough and Malissa C. Duff also take part in discussing the theories of how gesture and speech are related. Similarly to the first article they both present how gesture can help people to communicate more effectively as well as remember information better. However, in this article, the understudy of gestures in people with neurogenic communication disorders is emphasized. Those who suffer traumatic brain injuries force damage to the frontal lobe and temporal lobes leading to deficits in functioning, speed processing social cognition, and memory. Gesture is examined in three ways through the research of aphasia which is a left hemisphere stroke. One, characterizing gesture use, two, inhibiting gesture use to rehabilitate language, and three, boosting gesture use to facilitate communication. Treatments for these deficits are crucial as people with TBI have a hard time with non-verbal cues, therefore gestures help with word retrieval. Often, gesture is inhibited in some therapy protocols however, implementing the synergetic nature of speech and gesture helps to reach the goals of improving neural damage. Successful communication involves implementing and interpreting verbal and non-verbal signals which emphasize that using gestures can leverage language improvement as it can regenerate certain regions of the brain through the primary of gesture in spoken language. 

    Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth M. Wakefield's study as well as Sharice Clough and Malissa C. Duff's findings provide evidence of how co-speech gestures help cognitive improvements, like memory, however, the second article further explains the implementation of gestures by utilizing them to improve cognitive impairments. The first article gives a deeper background about co-speech amongst children who are bilingual and presents gesture study in language complexity while the second article touches on the usage of gestures in brain damage like Aphasia, Alzheimer's, and TBI. Knowing how gesture helps overall communication, this is able to be implemented in various studies as well. Proving that even if there is or isn't damage to your brain, hand movements combined with speech can overall be beneficial. Implementing both of these studies can help to shine lighter on co-speech research and the molecular aspects of gesture implementations. Overall, gesture is very important when it comes to memory and recall and may help many people communicate.

References: 

Clough, Sharice, and Melissa C. Duff. “The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition:     Implications for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 21 July 2020, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00323/full. 

"The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implications for Understanding and treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders"

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