Gestures are used in addition to spoken language in order to provide more information to either concur with or add to what the speaker is saying. Gesture has been proven to be very useful in teaching, especially when helping to reinforce new information. Furthermore, all people can be seen using gestures. Infants often use gestures to make up for their lack of language, helping them convey their emotions or needs when they are unable to explain. People will often employ gestures strategically while giving speeches so that they can reinforce and emphasize key points. Even blind people, who can’t see or benefit from gestures themselves, make gestures while they are speaking. Given that all people gesture while they are talking, including infants who lack language skills and blind people who can’t see other peoples’ gestures, questions can be raised over whether gestures have meaning, or if they simply draw attention while people speak. It is also unclear how effective gesture is to learning, as it typically depends on spoken words.
In The effects of gesture and action training on the retention of math equivalence, Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield investigated the extent to which gestures during instruction can help children to learn. She did so by testing third and fourth grade students on mathematical equivalence problems before and after watching an instructional video on how to solve them. The children were split into two groups that watched two different instructional videos; one video contained speech alone, and the other incorporated gestures along with the speech. This allowed a direct comparison to determine the extent to which gestures augmented the effect of the speech. When the children were tested after receiving instruction, Wakefield found there to be a significant difference between the children who were taught using gesture and taught through speech alone. (Wakefield, 2024) Therefore, children learn much better when the person teaching them utilizes hand gestures. This finding confirms what is already known, that hand gestures help to convey messages and aid in learning, and Wakefield went on to investigate how gestures aid in learning through examining where children look during gesture-aided instruction and how their viewing patterns impact the amount that they learn.
Through eye-tracking technology, Wakefield found that children look at the math problem they are learning to solve and the gesture space when their instruction includes gestures, while during speech alone they spend much more time looking at the speaker. (Wakefield, 2024) Although this may suggest that gestures simply draw attention towards the correct place to look, what really matters is if the children’s focus follows along with the movement of the speaker's hands. (Wakefield, 2024) Because this poses a difference in the amount that the child can learn, the gesture is doing more than simply showing them where to look. Rather, the gesture, or the way that they watch the person’s hand move, has some meaning that reinforces what is being taught through more than just directing their attention.
In addition to her findings on the learning of mathematical skills, Dr. Wakefield, along with Dr. Natalia Zielinski, tested the impacts of gestures on the narrative memory of children. They investigated how well bilingual children could remember story points in both their stronger and weaker languages when accompanied by matching or mismatching gestures. Matching gestures are gestures that directly align with the meaning of the words being spoken, while mismatching gestures display something different and a possible disconnect from what the words mean. In their paper, Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism, Zielinski and Wakefield found that gesture only helps in narrative memory when it is redundant with speech, and the effect is greater in the language that the child is less proficient in due to them paying more attention to gesture when they understand the words less.(Zielinski & Wakefield, 2021) This finding further demonstrates that gestures have meaning, as looking at a person’s gestures can provide an understanding that makes up for some of the lack of understanding of the words they are saying. While attention plays a role in the way gestures help children learn, it is more than just showing them where to look and when to pay attention. The children in this study subconsciously drew their attention towards the story-teller’s gestures when they had less understanding of the spoken language, and this allowed them to understand more of the story through the meanings of their gestures that matched what was being told to them.
While Zielinski and Wakefield found that children pay more attention to gestures when they are less able to understand language, it is also possible that children use gestures more when they have less ability to express what they mean to say. In their paper, Task-Related Differences in the Gesture Production of Young Autistic Children, Dr. Adrienne De Froy and Dr. Pamela Rosenthal Rollins investigated the difference in the production of gestures between autistic and typically developing children during tasks meant to elicit requests from the children. The purpose of this was to see how limited verbal skills (seen in the children with autism) impact the rate at which children use gestures to help them speak. The results show that during tasks meant to elicit communication from the children, children who have autism gesture at higher rates, and the ones with the highest rates of gesture are between six months and two years of age.(De Froy & Rollins, 2024) These findings suggest that gesture is used to account for a deficit in verbal skills, similarly to how attention is placed on gesture to account for a lack of language comprehension in Zielinski & Wakefield’s study.
The importance of gesture, and the meanings of gestures, is found in both the delivery and the reception aspect of communication. Gesturing provides information on the message being sent, helping to amplify communication, and it is useful for receiving and delivering messages when people are deficient in their verbal communication. Dr. Wakefield’s findings show that gestures have meanings, and therefore show more than just where to pay attention, and her later findings along with Dr. De Froy’s findings show that the meanings of gesture are used by people with communication deficits to provide extra information that they need to either understand or convey information.
References:
De Froy, A., Rollins, P.R., (April 2024) Task-related differences in the gesture production of young autistic children. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders.
Wakefield, E. M., (July 2024) The effects of gesture and action training on the retention of math equivalence. Frontiers in Psychology
Wakefield, E. M., Zielinski, N., (2021) Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism.
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