Gestures have been used since before the evolution of spoken language and has accompanied it through time. It is a critical part of language that holds the ability to communicate and influence understanding of spoken language as well as benefiting fundamental cognitive functions such as learning and memory, among others. Studies on gestures are vast, ranging from more documented psychological cases such as of discovering that gestures aid in comprehension of a lesser language proficiency to comparatively less documented research in the field of neuroscience such as of how gestures play a positive role in people with neurogenic communication disorders.
Gestures have significant effects on comprehension, and especially when coupled with speech, they are called "co-speech" gestures. Visual attention to these co-speech gestures coupled to a less proficient language was explored though a study involving children in the article by researchers Zielinski and Wakefield titled, "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Though a Visual Attention Mechanism" that claims that children make more use out of gestures in communicating than adults do. The researchers explored how the degree of dependence on gestures may be tied to the listener's level of language proficiency when attempting to understand elaborate messages in that language. Additionally, the question of whether directly paying visual attention to gestures aids in comprehension and memory of the narrative was considered. To answer these questions, a study on seventeen children aged 6-8 was conducted. They were bilingual in Polish and English, with most children possessing higher language proficiency in the latter language. Several video segments of two actresses using the two spoken languages accompanied with gestures were shown to the children who were then asked to recall the stories in the language in which the segments were presented. The results affirmed Zielinski and Wakefield's hypothesis, as the children were found to have successfully recalled a story in their weaker language, Polish, when accompanied by matching gestures as opposed to mismatching or no gestures. This same affect was not seen for stories in English, which the children were more fluent in. Furthermore, the children did pay more visual attention to gestures when watching the Polish video segments, which helped their comprehension and memory of the story during recall. Overall, this research article suggests that visual attention to matching gestures of a spoken message supports and boosts the interpretation and memory of a story in the listener's weaker language as compared to their stronger language.
The overarching findings by Zielinski and Wakefield on the power of co-speech gestures is affirmed and applied to a different population in the research article by Clough and Duff titled, "The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implication for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders." Like Zielinski and Wakefield, Clough and Duff assert that gestures have strong communicative benefits when used with speech and is particularly useful for learning and memory, which is in line with what the former set of researchers discovered though their study on the children attending Polish school. Similarly, in one part of their article, Clough and Duff discuss a variety of studies based on how gestures affect different cognitive functions like memory, referencing classroom studies in which children reportedly learn faster when teachers employ gestures while teaching. During the learning period, children would mimic their teachers' gestures, which was found to facilitate improved learning and memory of the subject. Not only were gestures beneficial to children, in a different study, it was found that they also played an important role in adults being able to recall both literal and abstract meanings when explaining metaphors.
The value of gestures is not limited to only cognitive benefits. A large part of Clough and Duff's research article discusses the role gestures play in neurogenic communication disorders, which is a broad term for communication-based damage of neurological origin. Included in this category are disorders such as aphasia, which results from a stoke to the left hemisphere and is characterized by difficulty in grammar, speech fluency, and word-finding. The use of gestures in populations living with aphasia has been shown to supplement speech to provide a more nuanced way of communication than is possible without gesturing. For people with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, Clough and Duff describe how gestures are one of the primary forms of communication depending on the severity of the injury. Moreover, their article covers Alzheimer's disease as well, and how gesturing has been found to support learning and memory in the populations living with this disease. However, research on the role of gestures in the field of neuroscience is relatively new, and Clough and Duff highlight the rich potential that further research on gestures hold in understanding neurogenic communication disorders.
In essence, although gestures seem to be just hand movements that can help in understanding from an outside perspective, they hold value of immense magnitude and have solidified their significance in communication through their multiple benefits both cognitively and in neurogenic communication disorders. Accordingly, the respective articles by Zielinski and Wakefield, and Clough and Duff both affirm the importance of gestures and the potential of greater impact.
References
Clough, S., & Duff, M. C. (2020). The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implications for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00323
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Though 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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