In her recent talk, Elizabeth Wakefield detailed her findings on the ways in which co-speech gesture can contribute to better understanding and processing of language. She explained that people often produce hand gestures to go along with their speech, sometimes without even realizing it. These gestures tend to be linked to our words and their meanings and are often used as a way to better convey a message. Through her research, Wakefield found that children were better receptive to these co-speech gestures than adults. To reach this conclusion, she, along with Natalia Zielinski, conducted a study with children who spoke both English and Polish, and tested their comprehension of stories told in both languages. When the children heard stories in Polish, which was determined to be their weaker language, the children were more likely to look at the gestures made by the storyteller in order to understand what they were being told. However, when the children heard a story in English, their attention was more focused on the speaker’s face than on their gestures. This finding pointed toward the idea that gestures are used to supplement a weaker understanding of language and could also be the reason that children tend to look at gesture more than adults. Their understanding of language is less developed, and so gathering visual information helps them better process what they hear.
Similarly, a study performed by Karin van Nispen et al. found that co-speech gestures were important for the comprehension of language, especially for individuals who had some sort of aphasia. For this study, participants who had no speech disorders were shown videos of either a person with an aphasia or a person without an aphasia telling a story in which the speaker performed gestures to go along with their speech. It was found that when the storyteller had a speech disorder, the listener paid more attention to their movements and gestures, as opposed to when the storyteller had fluent speech. When it became more challenging to understand the verbal information being presented, the observers tended to place more of their attention on the non-verbal gestures to gain information about the story they were listening to.
The work done by Karin van Nispen et al. provides more evidence for co-speech gesture improving comprehension of language and builds off of the results found by Wakefield and Zielinski. It is clear that a listener would experience deficits in comprehension when presented with speech they are unfamiliar with, whether that be a second language or due to a speech disorder. While Wakefield found that children were more likely to attend to gestures while listening to unfamiliar speech, the data collected by Karin van Nispen et al. seems to show that adults can also benefit from gesture. This could be because an adult may not possess the same skills to fully comprehend speech due to aphasia, but they would have much deeper understanding when listening to speech produced by someone with no speech disorder. This is similar to the way in which a child might pay more attention to gesture, as their comprehension of language is not as fully developed as an adult’s, and it helps them gain more context into what is being said. Overall, it can be said that observation of co-speech gestures can help us to better understand language, especially if it is unfamiliar to us.
References
Van Nispen, K., Sekine, K., Van der Meulen, I., Preisig, B. C. (2022). Gesture in the eye of the beholder: An eye-tracking study on factors determining the attention for gestures produced by people with aphasia. Neuropsychologia, Volume 174, 2022, 108315, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108315.
Zielinski, N., Wakefield, E.M., 2021. Language proficiency impacts the benefits of Cospeech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43 (43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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