How Hand Gestures Strengthen Understanding and Persuasion
Humans have developed many ways to communicate. Whether it's verbal communication, body language, or writing, humans have strived for connection and interaction. One of our greatest inventions is language, it is the conglomeration of all of these ways to communicate and we use it everyday. It plays an extraordinary role in the lives of every person on earth. Politicians use it to persuade, teachers use it to instruct, and healthcare professionals use it to save lives. It is a crucial instrument that we have been able to implement into every aspect of life. This post will explore the complexity of the interaction between verbal language and the use of hand gestures and discuss its further implications.
In a research paper titled, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism,” Elizabeth Wakefield and Natalie Zalinski study the connections between co-speech hand gestures with bilingual participants. Co-speech gestures refer to gestures performed simultaneously to provide speech. The bilingual participants were children ranging from age 6-8 who speak English and Polish as their second language. The participants were shown videos with scripted verbal stories in both English and Polish. Three different trial conditions were used including speech only, matching gesture to speech, and mismatching gesture to speech for both languages. Tracking the eye movement of the participants was used to analyze where their attention was focused during each of the trials. The participants were then asked to recall the story to determine the comprehension of each trial. The main findings of this study were that matching gestures significantly improved recall in the weaker language, however matching gestures did not significantly boost recall in the stronger language. Furthermore, mismatching gestures did not help and sometimes even hurt recall. To expand on these findings, they help explain why children benefit from gestures more than adults. As children develop language skills, gestures are a valuable visual support that allows the children to see another dimension of the information being presented to them.1
Gestures can be useful for more than just comprehension. In a news article titled “Hand gestures that illustrate speech boost persuasiveness, study shows”
They cover a study from the Sauder School of Business in which it is shown that using gestures with your speech can contribute to the overall persuasion of your message.2 In this study, Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, Jonah Berger, Mi Zhou, used a multiple methods to objectively measure and classify different types of hand gestures at scale, including: Automated video analysis of 2,100+ TED Talks, A large multimodal AI model analyzing ~200,000 video segments, and Preregistered controlled experiments. The findings suggest that more gesture contributes to greater persuasion. This is based on a few results. The first was based on analysis of videos, videos with greater gesturing obtained up to 5% more likes and positive comments. This theme persisted when researchers controlled for topic, length and other confounding variables. The researchers identified different types of hand movements which proved to have differences in their effectiveness to persuade. The first type of hand movement identified and the most effective for persuasion is illustrators. Illustrators visually represent exactly what's being said (comparable to the matching co-speech gestures in the bilingual comprehension study). For example if the presenter was talking about a sale increase they would trace a line up with their hands. The next type of hand movements were highlighters which tended to emphasize a point with more general movements, for example spreading their fingers and pushing their hands up to stress a point. And the final type was unrelated movements which had no communicative purpose, like fidgeting with their hands or making hand motions that didn't support the speech (comparable to the mismatched co-gestures in the bilingual comprehension study). So why does the illustrator type of gesture work? It can be broken down into a few factors. Firstly, Illustrators make content easier to understand by supporting speech with a direct and digestible visual aspect. This then translates into a presenter becoming more competent and credible to the audience as they are better able to understand. Finally the perceived credibility increases the persuasion of the speaker.3
These two articles show that co-speech gestures can be a crucial aspect for communication. It can both support the comprehension of weaker language speech and developing speech as is shown with the bilingual co-speech gesture research. It can also increase persuasion shown through the study of illustrative hand movements from speakers. This information has many implications. One example is its use in classrooms. If teachers are having trouble reaching their students, especially bilingual ones, it is definitely worth implementing more matching gestures with the material. Likewise in healthcare physicians often work with patients whose first language isn’t their own. Illustrative, co-speech gestures may be extremely beneficial to the patient's understanding. Whether it's the persuading of politicians, the teaching of students or saving lives, communication is a necessity and co-speech gestures should be used to support that communication.
References:
Zielinski N, Wakefield E. Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. Published online 2021.
Leslie T. Hand gestures that illustrate speech boost persuasiveness, study shows. physics.org. 2025. Accessed March 1, 2026. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-gestures-speech-boost-persuasiveness.html.
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