Gesture - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2023

Teachers often use gestures to connect representations of mathematical ideas. This research examined (1) whether such linking gestures help students understand connections among representations and (2) whether sets of gestures that include repeated handshapes and motions – termed gestural catchments – are particularly beneficial. Undergraduates viewed one of four video lessons connecting two representations of multiplication. In the control lesson, the instructor produced beat gestures that did not link the representations. In the link-only lesson, the instructor used gestures to link representations, but the gestures did not form a catchment. In the consistent-catchment lesson, the instructor highlighted corresponding elements of the two representations using identical gestures. In the inconsistent-catchment lesson, the instructor highlighted non-corresponding elements of the two representations using identical gestures. Participants who saw the lesson with the consistent catchment – which highlighted similarities between representations – were most likely to understand the novel representation and to report learning from the lesson.

This study explores the role of gestures in Flemish Sign Language (VGT) development through a longitudinal observation of three deaf children’s early interactions. These children were followed over a period of one and a half year, at the ages of 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months. This research compares the communicative development of a deaf child growing up in a deaf family and two deaf children growing up in hearing families. The latter two children received early cochlear implants when they were respectively 10 and 7 months old. It is the first study describing the types and tokens of children’s gestures used in early dyadic interactions in Flanders (Belgium). The description of our observations shows three distinct developmental patterns in terms of the use of gestures and the production of combinations. The study supports the finding that children’s gestural output is subject to their parental language, and it further indicates an impact of age of cochlear implantation.

We model the role of demographic, neuropsychological and speech variables in characterizing iconic gesture use in speakers with aphasia, especially gestures that supplement speech and are essential for understanding the spoken message. Using backward regression modelling with cross validation in 37 speakers with aphasia, literature-derived demographic (e.g., age), neuropsychological (e.g., aphasia and anomia severity), and speech (e.g., speaking duration) variables were used to predict frequency and rate (per minute) of iconic, supplementary, and essential gesturing. We identified that nearly 60% of iconic gestures produced by speakers were supplementary to speech with 38% being essential for understanding the speech. Generally, those with more severe aphasia, anomia, and with nonfluent aphasia tended to produce fewer tokens and a slower rate of speech, and these were the speakers who produced more and a higher rate of supplementary and essential gestures. These findings underline the importance of iconic gestures to improve communication.

According to the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis, one important function of representational gestures is to help speakers retrieve words for production. In this study, we test whether gestures help preschoolers access words for production. We tested two predictions generated from the LRH. First, since bilinguals often have greater difficulties with lexical access than monolinguals, we predicted that bilinguals will gesture more than monolinguals. Second, since low-frequency words are harder to access than high frequency words, we predicted that the more low-frequency words children used, the more they would gesture. Using children’s (aged 4 to 6 years) data from a storytelling task, we found no difference in gesture use between bilinguals and monolinguals. We did, however, find that the use of low-frequency words was a positive predictor of gesture use. While this result could support the LRH, an exploration of some examples of gesture production raises some doubts about that conclusion.