Gesture includes movements of the hands or head that often accompany spoken language and can express information through their form and movement trajectory. Gestures are used by people of all ages and are crucial for communication. It can support long-lasting, flexible learning and allows for manipulation of information, prompting processing ease. The mechanisms underlying cognition and language comprehension are believed to be related to the use of gestures.
The research article “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” by Zielinski and Wakefield delves into the impact gesture has on learning and promotion of cognitive change in children. In this study, 17 bilingual Polish English speakers, aged 6-8, were tested in their ability to understand a story in the presence and absence of gestures in both their weaker and stronger language. In this experiment, gesture movements were limited to the hands. The children had a story read to them with scripted gestures, such as looking through binoculars or rolling down a street. Then, the amount of each story that was remembered by each child was recorded, creating recall scores. It was ultimately found that children remembered more of the story in their weaker language when the story points were accompanied by matching gestures rather than no gesture. However, without any gestures, children remembered more story points in their stronger language. This provides evidence that matching gestures increase a child’s ability to comprehend language that is not as well developed. Gesture boosts language understanding for children, though only when redundant with speech in their weaker language. The findings of this study show a beneficial relationship between gestures and language comprehension, conveying that gestures can aid in facilitating learning.
Another research article regarding language and gesture, “Processing Language in face-to-face Conversation: Questions with Gestures get Faster Responses,” by Holler, Kendrick, and Levinson, examines the relationship between gestures and conversation speed. They pose the question: Do bodily signals facilitate or hinder language processing in the time-pressed environment that is a conversation? The experiment included dividing up 10 groups of Native English speakers into dyads or triads for conversation. Annotations of the occurrence of gestures were made for each question that was posed. In this experiment, gestures were defined as communicative movements of the head or hand produced as part of conveying a question. The experimenters also measured time at three separate times, at the preparation, stroke, and retraction phases of each gesture. Then, the gap between the end of one person’s question and the amount of time following a response was recorded. After measuring a total of 281 questions, with more than 60% of those questions involving gestures, it was found that gestures lead to faster responses to questions, indicating that manual gestures add a significant amount of meaning to what is being said. Conversations that included gestures reported a gap time of 0 MS, while conversations that excluded gestures reported a gap time of 200 MS, these results are accompanied with p< 0.0001, proving to be statistically significant. This research study provides a strong basis for gestures aiding in cognitive processing speed and language comprehension and production.
While these two studies take different approaches to understanding and unveiling the impact gesture has on language comprehension, they come to find similar results. Zielinski and Wakefield find that gestures can be beneficial for bilingual children in understanding their weaker language. In parallel to this, Holler, Kendrick, and Levinson find that in speech that is accompanied by gesture, the gap time between posing a question and the response decreases by 200 MS compared to a question without a gesture. This goes to show that gestures are an incredibly important and vital tool in all languages, as it ultimately induces an information processing advantage. The results of these two experiments can encourage more research on this relationship, including whether languages that regularly incorporate many or few gestures conclude similar results.
References
Holler J, Kendrick KH, Levinson SC. Processing language in face-to-face conversation: Questions with gestures get faster responses. Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Oct;25(5):1900- 1908. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1363-z. PMID: 28887798.
Natalia Zielinski, Elizabeth M. Wakefield. Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co- Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism.
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