Human communication is fascinating. It is something that is done every single day, oftentimes without giving it a second thought. People talk, engage, question, and interpret things millions of times a day and it is in these conversations that something occurs that might not be consciously thought of: gestural communication. The science shows that it is not paid as much attention to either. In Zielinski & Wakefield’s study titled “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism”, they cite a Gullberg and Holmqvist study that states that people look to the hands during communication less than 1% of the time, and mainly focus on a speaker’s face. They also cited a study in which children who were learning a mathematical concept looked to a teacher’s gestures 20% of the time, possibly because they were learning novel and potentially confusing information. These studies laid the foundation for the current study in which Zielinski & Wakefield hypothesize that bilingual children will pay attention to co-speech gestures in the language that they are not fluent in to aid in comprehension. To understand the nuance that co-speech gestures offer, they also use mismatching co-speech gestures and hypothesize that there will be more variation in understanding or a lack of recall due to its potentially distracting nature.
Zielinski & Wakefield found that co-speech gestures increase recall potential in bilingual children if the presented gesture matches the content of the information being presented. The children devoted more attention to the visual gestures when the information was not in their first language. Ultimately, gestures proved to be very helpful in communicating when there was a potential barrier to understanding.
Another community that often deals with communication barriers is individuals on the Autism Spectrum. In a study done by Bagdasarov et al., the researchers looked at co-speech gestures by individuals with Autism and neurotypical individuals in order to see the differences between the two groups. They found that adults with Autism primarily used gestures to indicate turn-taking within a conversation. These are known as interactive gestures which do not communicate information but rather aid in the structure of the conversation itself, such as who is speaking as indicated through pointing which indicates who’s turn it is or other hand gestures signaling that the speaker is not done speaking and does not wish to be interrupted. Ultimately it is seen that the benefit of co-speech gestures is generalizable across populations, serving as a helpful communication tool that aids with a variety of functions.
References
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). htt ps://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.
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