The Potential of Gesture to Improve Understanding and Recall in People with Communication Difficulties

        Co-speech gestures are a fundamental part of communication that can support a verbal message by supplying additional information or reinforcing important details. Research suggests that the use of co-speech gestures can improve understanding and recall in listeners with communication difficulties, such as those associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or trouble with language comprehension. Many factors influence how beneficial a gesture can be including its clarity, timing, and semantic relationship to spoken words. How much attention is directed towards the gesture is also an important factor in determining its effectiveness.

The article “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” by Zielinski & Wakefield (2021) examines how language proficiency affects the degree to which gesture improves understanding. Polish-English bilingual children listened to narratives in both their stronger language, English, and weaker language, Polish. After each story, the children were asked to retell what happened to measure their understanding. The results showed that matching co-speech gestures, but not gestures that provided additional information, improved recall for the narrative told in their less proficient language. An analysis of eye-tracking data showed that more visual attention was directed to co-speech gesture during the Polish narrative than in the English narrative. The researchers theorized that the children focused more on the gestures when it was harder to understand the story because the motions could be used to supplement the spoken message. Since very little visual attention was directed toward the gestures when the narrative was in their first language, it was proposed that co-speech gesture could have improved the children’s ability to retell the English story if they had focused on the gestures more. This study demonstrates how gesture can improve a person’s understanding of a message especially when their language skills are not as advanced. 

Though language proficiency does influence people’s ability to understand spoken narratives, communication differences also have an effect. Research conducted by Dargue, Sweller, & Carter (2021) investigated whether or not gesture could enhance learning for people with autism. A significant characteristic of ASD is difficulty with social interaction caused by a different understanding of interpersonal communication. Existing research suggests that these communication differences can cause issues with learning and recall. This study involved children diagnosed with autism watching two narrative videos, one without gesture and the other with iconic gestures. After each video, they were asked questions to assess their memory of details in the narrative. It was found that iconic gestures, which represent clear, definite actions, events, or things, improved recall. Since this type of gesture is closely associated with the meaning of the dialogue it relates to, it can clarify any potentially ambiguous speech and help people with autism better understand the message which would improve recall. These results indicate that gestures reinforcing the meaning of spoken words can make it easier for autists with communication differences to learn and recall information that is expressed verbally.

        The studies done by Zielinski & Wakefield (2021) and Dargue et al. (2021) both demonstrate that co-speech gesture can improve understanding and recall. Both experiments had small sample sizes so larger research studies need to be done to ensure that these findings are more widely applicable. Though further investigations are necessary, the use of gestures, particularly those that clarify the meaning of spoken words, has the potential to improve learning outcomes for people with communication difficulties.

Sources:

Dargue, N., Sweller, N., & Carter, M. (2021). Short report: Learning through iconic gesture in autism spectrum disorder. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 115, 104000. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2021.104000 

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.