Gestures represent a non-verbal way of communicating with others; they make up part of our conversations even without acknowledgment from our listeners. A month ago, we had the pleasure of learning more about gestures from Dr. Sarah Delmar. She introduced us to gesture-speech 'mismatches'- a term that is used when gesture conveys information different from speech. This is common when individuals, mostly children, have an idea on their mind that they communicate using their hands, but provide another information via speech. Dr. Delmar mentions that when a phenomenon like this occurs, it may lead to cognitive instability, which could lead to change. Gesture-speech mismatches happen when our brains attempt to activate two ideas at once. By doing this, speakers save cognitive resources that would otherwise have been used in speech, but this allows them to allocate more resources to their thoughts and gesture illustrations.
In a study carried out by Gibson et al., the researchers aim to investigate the effect of number-word related gesture-speech mustaches on children. This study informs us that children that produce gesture-speech mismatches on tasks tend to "profit from instruction" on the specific task. The authors found it common for children to produce mismatches on tasks related to numbers. For instance, when children were asked to label two objects. They label 'one' and 'three', but they display 1 finger to denote 'one', and 2 fingers to denote 'three'. The researchers consider this to be slightly different from the conventional mismatches; those can usually be integrated in the speech. On the other hand, this type of mismatch s involves a gesture response that completely contradicts the verbal response. To investigate which children will benefit from number-word lessons, the researchers conduct a pre-test and posttest. The pre-test is carried out before any learning/lessons, it required the children to label objects. Between the pre and posttest, the researchers provided two types of training to the children. The first was with basic number input; they counted each set of objects while the experimenter pointed to each object. The second was a more in-depth one which taught the children how to contrast number words in terms of their size (a bigger number is a larger quantity; more fingers mean larger number). After the post test, the researchers found that the odds of improving and remembering number words for those who were mismatchers in the pre-test was about 14.09 times greater than those who did not mismatch initially. This study proved that children who produce gesture-speech mismatches when labeling sets are more likely to benefit from learning new number words compared to non-mismatchers. They inform us that their study also extends to previous research which "demonstrate the power of gesture-speech mismatch to predict learning capability".
This study strongly correlates with the concept of gesture-speech mismatch that Dr. Selmar spoke about. From her talk, we learned that although, gesture sometimes conveys information not found in speech, it still promoted learning. The study discussed above mentions how children put up more fingers for smaller numbers; this changed when they went through a training that described the relation between numbers, size, and quantity. This change is indicative of what Dr. Selmar mentions; children who gesture are more likely to succeed after instruction than children who do not. Both Dr. Selmar's talk, and the study described show us that gesturing is a way to comprehend a speaker's thoughts; thoughts that may nay be revealed in words. In the future, this could be an effective learning tool; it could be used to communicate novel ideas in a visuospatial manner.
References:
Gibson, D. J., Gunderson, E. A., Spaepen, E., Levine, S. C., & Goldin‐Meadow, S. (2019). Number gestures predict learning of number words. Developmental Science, 22(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12791
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