Nonverbal behaviors, such as hand gestures, are a driving force in human communication that many often overlook as they just come naturally while speaking across cultures. Nonverbal behaviors can not only help increase language comprehension/retention, but also act as a way of communication across cultures and languages when language cannot. For example, some hand gestures that are universal across cultures and can be used to aid communication when language barriers are present. In the paper, “The Role of Visual Attention in Processing and Learning from Gesture,” by Elizabeth Wakefield this idea of the importance of co-speech gestures is explored, specifically including language comprehension in bilingual children.
Wakefield’s research in this paper is focused on the impact of co-speech gestures in bilingual children, not of equal proficiencies in the two languages, and if gestures help the children understand and remember a narrative being told in their less proficient language compared to their more proficient language. Techniques were used such as eye tracking to determine where the children were looking at the speaker while being told the narrative. From the results, it was found that co-speech gestures do help language comprehension: when being told the narrative in their less proficient language, the children were able to better recall the narratives when hand gestures were used. Along with the finding that co-speech hand gestures help language comprehension, from eye tracking, it was found that the children paid more attention to the hands of the speaker when listening to the language they are less proficient in.
With co-speech gestures being a part of communication that largely varies across cultures, the question can come up of how the cultural impact could alter the effectiveness of co-speech gestures as an aid in language comprehension? In a paper by Hio Tong Pang, Xiaolin Zhou, and Mingyuan Chu, “Cross-cultural Differences in Using Nonverbal Behaviors to Identify Indirect Replies,” it is investigated how different cultures interpret non-verbal behaviors in order to understand indirect replies. Indirect replies are use of language that hints at the meaning rather than just simply stating it. This study included both culturally British and Chinese individuals, and included the participants interpreting non-verbal gestures from their own and each other's cultures. The results found that British individuals were better at recognizing indirect replies from British individuals but struggled with indirect replies from Chinese individuals, while Chinese individuals were able to recognize indirect replies from both Chinese and British individuals. An important thing to note when interpreting these findings is a major cultural difference between the UK and China: that the UK is an individualistic society while China is a collectivist society. This can lead to the conclusion that Chinese individuals were better at decoding indirect replies due to being from a collectivist society rather than an individualistic society like the British individuals.
These two studies reveal that co-speech gestures can not just help people communicate across languages, but also cultures. In a multi-cultural world, co-speech gestures make it capable to communicate where words cannot. Recognition and understanding of nonverbal gestures is something that varies across cultures, but they hold the power to aid in communication across all.
References
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. 2101-2107. Paper presented at 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021, Virtual, Online, Austria.
Pang, H.T., Zhou, X. & Chu, M. Cross-cultural Differences in Using Nonverbal Behaviors to Identify Indirect Replies. J Nonverbal Behav 48, 323–344 (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-024-00454-z
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