Co-Speech Gesture

Co-speech gesture is defined as a hand or body movement that occurs simultaneously with spoken language, conveying additional yet congruent information about the verbal speech. Research shows that children benefit from co-speech gestures more than adults because children have comparatively weaker levels of fluency in verbal speech, causing them to rely more heavily on gestures for interpreting and decoding complex speech. Dr. Wakefield and colleagues explored the degree to which children benefit from co-speech gestures, and whether their language proficiency modulates the extent to which they benefit and are able to accurately retell a story. It was hypothesized that children would rely more on visual cues, or gestures, when being told a story in their second language, thereby giving gestures a greater opportunity to affect their comprehension of the message.

The researchers used two types of gestures: matching gestures, which are completely redundant with the auditory speech, and mismatched gestures, which add additional information that is not explicitly stated in the speech. The study found that matching gestures in the participant’s second language aided in their ability to accurately retell the narrative, while mismatching gestures greatly reduced comprehension in both their first and second language. Ultimately, mismatching gestures distracted from the information provided in the verbal speech, and resulted in the participants recalling modifications in the story in both their first and second languages (Zielinski, 2024).

However, there is evidence that actually contradicts this finding, suggesting that while mismatching gestures are detrimental for comprehension of a narrative, they may be beneficial in other curricular domains, such as mathematics. In fact, experimental studies of simple math equivalence problems have demonstrated that verbal instruction accompanied by mismatching gestures leads to more flexible and sustained learning than matching gestures. In the mismatching gesture condition of this experiment, the teacher used verbal speech to demonstrate one correct strategy to solve the equivalence problem, while using gesture to portray a complementary learning strategy. Students showed greater learning when presented with the simultaneous verbal and mismatched-gesture strategies for solving the mathematics problem than in the matching-gesture or no gesture condition (Church, 2024). This shows that while mismatching gestures has a negative effect on learning in some contexts, like narrative comprehension, in other contexts, like mathematics, it enhances understanding and makes the concept clearer to students by providing them with two separate routes to the correct answer.

Teachers can refer to the existing research to strategically use co-speech gestures to enhance student’s understanding of course material. In subjects like reading comprehension, educators should predominantly use matching gestures to reinforce the verbal message without adding any additional information that could cloud the students comprehension. Maintaining consistency between gestures and speech is important in this domain as to not distract from the verbal or written narrative. However, in subjects like math, mismatching gestures can provide students with an additional problem-solving method, stimulating different cognitive pathways, and ultimately helping students develop a deeper and more flexible understanding of the material. Educators can maximize their student’s learning benefits of both matching and mismatching gestures by tailoring their gestures to the specific subject that they are teaching. 

Work Cited

Church, R. B., Perry, M., Singer, M. A., Cook, S. W., & Alibali, M. W. (2024). Teachers’ gestures and how they matter. Topics in Cognitive Science, 16(1), 257-272. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12755

Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2024). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000406