In our Neuroscience Seminar at Loyola University Chicago, we discussed how nonverbal cues like gestures can influence communication in learning. Our guest speaker, Elizabeth Wakefield, conducted a study, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism”. In this study, she examined how co-speech gestures help bilingual children understand and remember spoken stories. Polish-English bilingual children watched short video narrations in both languages. Some videos had gestures to mirror the speech, some had mismatched gestures, and the rest had no gestures. Researchers used eye-tracking to see where the kids were looking. The results showed that children focused more on gestures when listening in their weaker language, Polish. When gestures matched the speech, the children remembered more details of the story in their weaker language. When listening in their stronger language, English, gestures didn’t provide a noticeable advantage. This study helps illustrate how gestures can help children process and retain information when speech alone is difficult to understand.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to children alone. A study done by University of Zurich, “Gestures Can Improve Understanding in Language Disorders”, examined how adults perceive gestures from people with aphasia. Aphasia is explained to be a language disorder that is often caused by brain injury or stroke that causes difficulty speaking. Healthy participants of the study watched videos of speakers with and without aphasia and had their eye movements tracked. The researchers found that listeners paid more attention to the hand gestures of those with aphasia, especially when speech was unclear. This demonstrates that gestures become an essential tool for adults with communication challenges, such as aphasia.
Together, these studies highlight the importance of gestures as a component of communication, not just as an addition to speech. When speech is strong and easy to understand, gestures do not play an important role in comprehension. However, when speech is challenging, gestures become essential to the comprehension of it. This can be seen across all ages, as examined in these two studies. In bilingual children, weaker language proficiency led to greater attention to gestures. In adults observing speakers with aphasia, the less clear the speech, the more attention there was to gestures. Ultimately, this focus on gesture helped with better overall understanding of the speech and better memory.
The implications of these studies go beyond the lab and can be put into practice to enhance communication. Educators working in multilingual classrooms could intentionally incorporate gesture to help the comprehension of students not yet proficient in the language. Speech therapists might encourage individuals with aphasia to focus on gestures to strengthen their communication. More generally, teaching people to actively incorporate gestures and to become more aware of them can help make communication more effective. Additionally, focusing on integrating gestures into our daily speech can make communication more inclusive for those who may have trouble understanding speech alone.
References:
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.
Karin van Nispen et al. "Gestures Can Improve Understanding in Language Disorders." Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/gestures-aphasia-understanding-21002/
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