The Impact of Gestures on Learning and Comprehension of a Language

     I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield talk about her research in a seminar recently. Specifically, the work in her and Dr. Natalia Zielinski’s paper, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” In the talk, she spoke about how language and gestures are linked together. When people talk, they use hand gestures naturally. Using hands or body when talking is known as co-speech, and these gestures can help people understand. An example proposed in the talk used a person describing someone putting on jewelry. The first video, without motion, said that they were putting on jewelry, while the second video used a motion of putting a ring on a finger during the sentence. Talking with the motion gives more context to what is being said and gives the listener the answer to what specific jewelry was being put on, without verbally mentioning a ring.

    In the paper previously mentioned, they studied Polish-English Bilingual children and tested language proficiency to see if there is any link between gestures and understanding a narrative. Stories were spoken in both languages, some with and some without gestures. During the study, a correlation was found between a weaker language (Polish) and a benefit from using hand gestures. When the children knew the language less, they relied more on gestures, and it helped them understand the story. In English, there was a slight negative impact of adding gestures to the narratives. This is caused by the children focusing too much on the gestures and not enough on the story presented. In Polish, a story without gestures was the lowest remembered of the tested categories. The study mainly looked at children due to their lower language proficiency. Language proficiency is seen in this study to be tied with the use of gestures to comprehend a narrative more compared to no gestures.

    In a recent study done by Xiaoyi Huang, Nayoung Kim, and Kiel Christianson, they looked at pairing a gesture with learning a foreign language. The participants were taught words in Mandarin, and a gesture was paired with the words. There were iconic gestures, such as talking on the phone or drinking, and arbitrary gestures that have no prior connection to a word. The thirty participants in the study had no previous experience speaking Mandarin or any Chinese language. Eighteen words were presented, with six being accompanied by iconic gestures, six with arbitrary gestures, and six without gestures. After two sessions, the students took a multiple-choice test with the instructor speaking the words and the gesture associated with them. Students were eight to ten percent better with gestures compared to without. According to the research Kiel Christianson, “visualizing a gesture with each word creates multiple pathways into the semantics of new words and helps students remember them better.” There is a fall off after twelve words, after which the students cannot learn and retain all those words. Overall, it is helpful for students to learn a new language while the teacher is using hand gestures.

References

Huang, X., Kim, N. and Christianson, K. (2019), Gesture and Vocabulary Learning in a Second Language. Language Learning, 69: 177-197. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12326

Zielinski, Natalia, and Elizabeth M. Wakefield. “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 43, no. 43, 2021, escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.