Gesture - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2014

Around the age of nine months, children start to communicate by using first words and gestures, during interactions with caregivers. The question remains as to how older preschool children utilise the gestures they observe into their own gestural representations of previously unseen objects. Two accounts of gesture production (the ‘gesture learning’, and ‘simulated representation’ accounts) offer different predictions for how preschool children use the gestures they observe when describing objects. To test these two competing accounts underlying gesture production, we showed 42 children (mean age: 45 months 14 days) four novel objects using speech only, or speech accompanied by either movement or physical feature gestures. Analyses revealed that (a) overall symbolic gesture production showed a high degree of individual variability, and (b) distinct observed gesture types influenced the children’s subsequent gesture use. Specifically, it was found that children preferred to match movement gestures in a subsequent communicative interaction including the same objects, but not physical feature gestures. We conclude that the observation of gestures (in particular gestures that depict movement) may act to change preschool children’s object representations, which in turn influences how they depict objects in space.

Recent research has demonstrated instruction that includes gesture can greatly impact the learning of certain mathematics tasks for children and much of this work relies on face-to-face instruction. We extend the work on this problem by asking how gesture in instruction impacts adult learning from a video production for a science concept. Borrowing from research by Perry and Elder (1997), the research presented here examines what role adding gesture to instruction plays for adults learning about gear movement. In this pretest-instruction-posttest design, 56 college-aged participants were asked to complete problems relating to gear movement. Participants viewed either an instructional video in which an instructor used speech only (control) or speech-plus-gesture (experimental) to explain a fundamental principle in the physics of gear movement. Results showed that adults who knew less actually learned more and that instruction was effective, but significantly more effective when gesture was added. These findings shed light on the role of gesture input in adult learning and carry implications for how gesture may be utilized in asynchronous instruction with adults.

Research on embodied cognition has shown that action and language are closely intertwined. The present study seeks to exploit this relationship, by systematically investigating whether motor activation would improve eight-to-nine year old children’s learning of vocabulary in their first language. In a within-subjects paradigm, 49 children learned novel object manipulation, locomotion and abstract verbs via a verbal definition alone and in combination with gesture observation, imitation, or generation (i.e., enactment). Results showed that learning of locomotion verbs significantly improved through gesture observation compared to verbal definitions only. For learning object-manipulation verbs, children with good language skills seemed to benefit from imitation and enactment, while this appeared to hinder children with poor language skills. Learning of abstract verbs was not differentially affected by instructional condition. This study suggests that the effectiveness of observing and generating gestures for vocabulary learning may differ depending on verb type and language proficiency.

Gesture is part of the linguistic capital of every culture. Members learn from birth those gestures operative in their culture and community. Once learned, the use of gestures becomes so routinized that it appears as the natural and logical way to meaningfully communicate. This paper documents, illustrates, and describes some of the hand and facial gestures in use among Yoruba people of Nigeria. Accompanying the descriptions are the interpretations of the identified quotable gestures within the socio-cultural context of their usage. Further, the paper highlights the ‘face of earnest’ because of the cross-cultural miscommunication that it generates.

The ubiquity of index-finger pointing, and its early emergence in child development, has suggested that such pointing may be biologically-determined. However, cross-cultural variation in the form of pointing has also been noted, with some observations of middle-finger pointing. Here we examine the limited corpus of publically-available video data on the signs and gestures of Genie, a child who suffered severe social and linguistic deprivation throughout her childhood. These data suggest that Genie favored the use of the middle finger in points, in ASL signs that have an index-finger target handshape, and in object exploration. We speculate that middle-finger pointing in children may reflect an articulatory preference that is not limited to pointing, but that may encompass a range of manual behaviors.