Recently, I was given the opportunity to listen to Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield discuss her research findings on the relationship between speech and gesture in language comprehension. From her research, Wakefield and her colleagues determined that the amount of attention given to gestures while someone is speaking is influenced by a person’s proficiency in the language. To determine this, Wakefield and her colleagues tracked the eye movements of bilingual children with a stronger proficiency in one language than the other as they watched several lectures in both languages. This allowed the researchers to analyze how often the children attended to the hand gestures and compare it with their comprehension of the lecture. The data showed that a lower language proficiency lead to a higher attentiveness to the gestures of the lecturers.
After hearing Dr. Wakefield talk about her and her colleagues findings from this study, I was reminded of the Asch Conformity Experiment on peer pressure and assimilation I had learned about previously. The Asch Conformity Experiment examined what it takes for a person to ignore what they know to be true because of the opinions of others. In this study, one participant was asked an easy question after witnessing several confederates intentionally answer the same question incorrectly. Similar to the later Stanford Prison Experiment, researchers concluded that it takes little pressure for people to deny what they believe to be true and conform to a group.
Based on these two studies, I believe that further research should be conducted on the relationship between gestures and body language and how they influence our likelihood of forsaking our beliefs to conform to perceived expectations. Exploring this connection could further our understanding of how gestures can be effectively used in the classroom to support student learning as well as identify the factors that lead people to go against their personal knowledge or even compromise their moral code under social pressure.
Asch, S. E. (1952). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership, and men. Carnegie Press. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1952-asch.pdf
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). 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. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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