Communication is an important aspect of humans, as it allows us to interact with others in multitudes of ways, being able to share and receive information. While many may think that communication just involves speaking, there’s a lot more to it. There are both kinesthetic and visual components that play a crucial role in understanding messages.
One study which shows this idea is an article by Natalia Zeilinski and Elizabeth M. Wakefield, titled “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism”. The paper examines bilingual children, and how their proficiency in each language affects the benefits they receive from co-speech gestures. When listening to a story in English, the childrens’ better language, co-speech gestures didn’t help as much as they did when they heard the same story in Polish, their less known language. This shows that children benefited from gestures when listening to stories in their lesser known language, as there was more visual attention to the speaker’s hands. When children struggle with processing auditory aspects of communication, they rely on other aspects in order to understand, such as hand movements.
Another article which focuses on the importance of hand gestures in understanding speech is “Hand Constraint Reduces Brain Activity and Affects the Speed of Verbal Responses on Semantic Tasks” by Sae Onishi, Kunihito Tobita, and Shogo Makioka. This study investigates how restricting hand movements can affect one’s brain activity and response time when given a spoken task. In order to do this, participants (whose hands were restrained) were presented with words that were either manipulable or non-manipulable objects, such as a pencil and a windmill. They were then asked which object was larger. After performing the experiment and tracking their brain activity, results showed that having constrained hands lessened activity in the brain regions associated with language processing of objects. The participants were also slower in their responses. This shows how important kinesthetic and motor processes are in understanding speech, and how it’s not all auditory.
Both these studies can relate to each other, as they investigate how physical/bodily engagement can affect the processing of language. On one hand, Onishi et al. (2022) covers how less hand movement leads to less understanding of language, while Zeilinski et al. (2021) covers how the addition of hand movement/gestures can add to one’s understanding of language. These articles are proof that human brains are more complex than we think, and that our brains are able to adapt and use different parts of it in order to understand information. There are strong dynamics between the five human senses, and studies like these help bring us closer to understanding it.
References
Onishi, S., Tobita, K., & Makioka, S. (2022, August 8). Hand constraint reduces brain activity and affects the speed of verbal responses on Semantic Tasks. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17702-1
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
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