I recently had the privilege of hearing Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield present her research on Gesture and how we see and perceive it in our everyday lives. Her research paper is called “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” She completed this research paper with Dr. Natlia Zielinski. In this paper, Zielinski and Wakefield discuss how teaching, learning, understanding, and communication are all affected by gesture. One of the main findings pointed out in this paper was that children are more efficient learners when the teacher is using gestures combined with speech to teach their students. They also found that speech alone is not nearly as effective as speech combined with gesture to get your point across. One question that I had is, where does gesture come from? Not only do we use it when teaching, but we also use it in everyday conversation. We know that we were never formally taught gestures, it kind of… comes naturally? One interesting point brought up by Dr. Wakefield was that they’ve noticed even people who have been blind since birth use gestures when they’re speaking, and it looks very similar to how people with vision gesture.
Another study I recently came across was published on Science Daily called “When it comes to communication skills, maybe we’re born with it?” This study was done by a Neuroscientist and Speech pathologist from Boston University named Jennifer Zuk. In this article, Zuk conducts long-term studies on children from infancy to age 5. She wanted to explore how early development of brain structures relates to the communication and language skills developed later on in childhood. Part of this study was to find out what communication skills we may be born with and which of them are learned from parents or environment. One major part of this research was looking at white matter in the brain. She used an MRI to measure infants’ white matter, looking at organization and how white matter is used as a “highway” to connect different brain regions. When she went back to look again years later, children who had stronger organization of white matter in specific regions of the brain had considerably better vocabulary and sound-processing skills around the kindergarten age. This leads us to believe that a lot of our basic communication skills are biological and rooted in brain development early on in life.
These two articles were interesting to me together, because after just recently hearing Wakefield’s study about gesture and how it has become apparent that gesture isn’t really a learned behavior, I found myself wondering how much of our communication and social behaviors are learned and how many are biological. The study conducted by Jennifer Zuk was able to answer that question for me. While we can see, as proven by the two examples above, that more of our communication skills are biological than we may have previously assumed, both researchers have also made it a point that many of our communication and social behaviors are still learned and conditioned by the environment and people around us. Elizabeth Wakefield explained in her presentation that even though everyone gestures, the gestures that people use for certain things, how often people use gestures in speech, and how dramatic gestures are, differ from region to region, showing that our innate behavior of gesture is still dependent partially on where we are. These two articles have shown me that, for the most part, as far as communication goes environment doesn't determine that we do these behaviors, but how we do these behaviors.
References:
ScienceDaily. (2021, September 24). When it comes to communication skills, maybe we’re born with it? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210924182533.htm
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism.
co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism.
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