Nonverbal modes of communication such as gestures are used in everyday life. These gestures are usually spontaneous but are done on instinct as a regular part of conversation. Gestures can supplement communication by enhancing what is being conveyed, but they can also express emotion and revoke a response from a person’s audience. The most common gestures used are generally hand movements that are intended to supplement what is being spoken. While it may not seem apparent, gestures are a crucial component of comprehension and the extent to which they facilitate in areas of learning is still actively being investigated.
Recent research by Elizabeth M. Wakefield and Natalia Zielinski named, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” studied bilingual children to assess if using gestures in a child’s weaker language benefited learning outcomes. More specifically they wanted to determine if a child’s language proficiency contributed to the usage of co-speech gestures to help comprehend a spoken message and the role of visual attention to gestures. Mainly focusing on whether gestures facilitate better retention in a child’s weaker language, which in this research is Polish, and the stronger language is English. Their research revealed that co-speech gestures do boost a child’s ability to recall information presented to them in a story in their weaker language. However, these had to be ionic gestures meaning the gesture had to relate to the information in the story. Additionally, it was found that children expressed greater visual attention to gestures in their weaker language exhibiting that co-speech gestures might be used as a supplemental tool when a message is more difficult to understand. Therefore, the research indicates that gestures do facilitate improvement in cognitive abilities such as learning.
Additionally, a similar study was published in 2019 called, “Depth of Encoding Through Observed Gestures in Foreign Language Word Learning” by Macedonia, et al. In this study, they go one step deeper and analyze the mechanism of how gestures might be able to enhance learning, using the same construct of foreign language as their basis of inquiry. They used both fMRI and behavioral studies to explore word encoding within the brain. The foreign language in this case was a made-up language and participants encoded the words three different times first visually, then audiovisually, and additionally by observing ionic gestures (SMO). Hemodynamic activity or blood flow to different cortical areas for each encoding was then investigated. The behavioral test of this research was a simple recall test that showed better recall of the words presented when gestures were involved, as did the research above. In the SMO condition, fMRI data showed bilateral activity in the primary motor cortices, cerebellum, and inferior parietal lobes. The article explains that activation of the primary motor cortex could be engaging procedural memory which may contribute to enhanced recall due to the creation of extended networks within the brain. The final conclusion of this article is that observation of an iconic gesture in a foreign language leads to better memory due to the heightened activation of sensorimotor networks within the brain which consequently leads to deeper encoding.
Both of these research articles highlight a key finding that gestures relating to a spoken word or message enhance recall and play a crucial role in facilitating learning. The first article portrays this finding through its investigation of bilingual children. The second article provides a further understanding of this phenomenon by using fMRI to analyze the neural substrates that might underlie how gestures actually produce a deeper encoding that produces the results in both of these research articles. Knowing this knowledge could provide a pivotal change in the way information is presented within schools to optimize learning and memory. Further research on this will need to be held out to validate these claims, but the findings presented between these two studies reveal that co-speech gesture does in fact facilitate higher quality learning and retention.
References
Macedonia, M., Repetto, C., Ischebeck, A., & Mueller, K. (2019). Depth of Encoding Through Observed Gestures in Foreign Language Word Learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00033
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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