Communicative Learning by Hand: How Gesture Promotes Skill Acquisition Throughout Childhood
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Communication through discrete gesturing has been observed and discussed for more than 2,000 years, but its purpose, development, and mechanisms remain cloaked in mystery, particularly in atypically developing populations. Ancient Roman orators, including Quintillian who famously analyzed gesture in his eleven volume periodicals, to modern politicians have deliberately manipulated their hands in ways to appear honest, intelligent, and electable during speech (Lozarno & Tversky, 2006). Given the pervasiveness and importance of gestures for communicative function (Krauss et al. 1995), we will explore the empirical evidence provided by various authors in relation to its development in childhood.
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Perhaps innate or learned by imitation, gesturing is a universal behavior that is performed by individuals in every culture across the globe. Both adults and children gesture simultaneously when they explain solutions to problems verbally (Garber & Goldin-Meadow, 2002). Gesturing is such a persistent communicative tool that speakers often gesture while engaged in telephone conversation with a listener that is not even within view (Bavelas et al. 2008).
We can define “gesture” as a sequence of hand motions that are performed along with speech and are not consciously produced by the speaker. According to Jacobs and Garnham (2007), the gesturing construct also excludes sign language and mannerisms such as touching one’s face or hair. In this way, gesturing provides a physical representation of information that is distinct from the information being conveyed by speech.
Jacobs and Garnham (2007) employ two major theories to explain the functionality of conversational hand gestures. On one hand, gesturing may serve to conjure up spoken words (speech production hypothesis). Alternately, gesturing may provide a framework to package the information conveyed through communication to aid comprehension by the listener. Carter et al. (2006) goes on to propose that gestures: 1) draw attention to important parts of speech, 2) provide information not available in speech, 3) replace words that are not immediately accessible, and 4) offer a shared means for silent group communication.
When children use gesturing as a means of communication, they often reveal acquired knowledge that they cannot yet express verbally. With this in mind, gesturing is likely to reveal those unspoken thoughts and skills that children are on the verge of learning (Goldin-Meadow, 2004). Conversely, gesturing may also play an active role in influencing children’s knowledge, both indirectly as it transforms a child’s communicative environment and directly, through effecting children’s cognitive state.
Gesturing Across Childhood
In human development gesture production predates linguistic milestones (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2007). An infant’s first meaningful gestures emerge at approximately ten months, when babies begin to reach towards objects to indicate interest and direct adult attention (Goodwyn et al. 2000). Albeit primitive in nature, these basic motions lay the groundwork for more sophisticated communicative gesturing. As pre-linguistic infants, parents may choose to teach “baby sign” to purposefully encourage their infants to use gestures as symbols for requests and objects. Goldin-Meadow (2006) suggests that although teaching baby sign may not have a long-term effect on vocabulary acquisition, short-term effects, such as opening a communicative pathway can be extremely beneficial to the parent-child relationship.
Just as the onset of pointing predicts the timeframe for a child’s first words, the production of gesture and word combination immediately precedes two-word combined speech (Iverson et al. 2003). Even after children have begun to talk in complete sentences, they continue to produce gestures in combinations with words (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Additionally, during the toddler years, conceptualization and sophistication of representative gestures improve. At three years old, a child will depend on his body to represent a tool in pantomime (e. g. using a finger to represent a paintbrush), but by five, this same child will no longer need a concrete representation of the object (e. g. holding a hand across paper as if holding a paintbrush) (Goodwyn et al. 2000).
Types of Gestures
In their first few years of life, children have the daunting task of acquiring many types of gestures with varied meanings, three of which we will examine in the context of development. Representational gestures, the most extensively used type, include those that accompany an obvious connection between the form of the gesture and that which it represents. Iconic gestures, on the other hand, are often used to describe shape, movement or denote specific physical feature of an object. Finally, metaphoric gestures communicate information about the nature of an action through an easily interpretable movement (Jacobs & Garnham, 2007).
Brain Activation During Gesturing
Gesturing plays a vital role in memory, as people are more likely to remember an action that they have used their bodies to perform. When children comprehend an action word that is indicative of a body part, the area of the brain associated with that body part is activated (Goldin-Meadow, 2009). For this reason, children who gesture while learning are activating an additional neural pathway for memory.
During a functional MRI study, Straube et al. (2006) concluded that the inferior frontal gyrus, premotor cortex, and middle temporal gyrus were activated when individuals performed metaphoric gestures, in addition to a correlation apparent between hippocampal activation and memory performance. In contrast, mismatched or unrelated speech and gesture combinations were instead processed in areas of the occipito-temporal and cerebellar region, mirroring the processing of a no-gesture condition (Straube et al. 2006). Evidence of specialized brain activation for gesture implies that gesturing holds some sort of important function in communicative processing and learning.
Parent-Child Interactive Gestures
Parents play a vital role in the language development of their children as most often either the mother or father is the first reciprocal communicative partner of an infant. By twelve months of age, babies can understand the meaning behind the gestures produced by others. Iverson et al. (1999) analyzed the maternal use of gesture during mother-toddler interactions to determine if maternal gestures were modified as their daughter’s speech becomes more complex. This study concluded that mothers do in fact modify their gestures in consistent ways as their children’s skills expand and use significantly more pointing and representational gestures when interacting with their infants compared to adults (Iverson et al. ,1999)
Maternal gesturing has been linked to children’s eventual vocabulary development. When parents point to an object while verbally providing a label, the learning experience becomes more salient through both auditory and visual input. Moreover, children from low socioeconomic status families typically have much smaller vocabularies at kindergarten than their higher SES peers. Rowe & Goldin-Meadow (2009) explained this disparity in noting that the mothers of children from high SES families used significantly more communicative gestures at their child’s age of 14 months than low SES families, which persists until at least the child enters his or her fifty-four month.
Gesturing Conveys Important Information to the Listener
As evident by parent-child interactions, young listeners are able to glean a great deal of information from viewing gestures by others. Gesturing during instruction tends to encourage children to produce their own gestures, which often translates into learning. Goldin-Meadow et al. (1999) specifically identified problem-solving strategies that children were able to acquire as a result of viewing their teachers’ gestures and recasting them into their own speech. Furthermore, when children imitate these goal directed behaviors, they are able to understand the goals that motivate them (e. g. when a child witnesses his mother touch a light switch, he recognizes his mother’s goal of turning on the light (Cook & Goldin-Meadow, 2006). Gesturing during speech allows listeners to gather perceptual-motor information about a particular task or object described by the speaker. In a study conducted by Cook and Tanenhaus (2009), children were asked to explain how to solve the Tower of Hanoi to listeners with either real objects or on a computer model. Surprisingly, the speaker’s hand gestures and not their speech, indicated to the listener whether the task had been completed on a computer or with real objects. Listeners thus treated computer simulations more like real objects when they had received an explanation from a speaker who had used the real objects in completion of the task. In a similar task, children were given instructions with and without gestures and also with and without concrete objects to solve the classic Piaget conservation task. Ping and Goldin-Meadow (2008) found that when children were given instructions with combined speech and gesture learned more about conservation, regardless of the presence or absence of water-filled glasses.
Finally, Lozarno and Tversky (2006) have demonstrated that listeners are capable of describing the identity of an unknown object when a speaker has performed an illustrative gesture of the item. For listeners to interpret gestures outside of speech, however, the listener must focus added attention to the individual gesturing (Lozarno & Tversky, 2006).
Gesturing Benefits the Speaker
Gestures clearly benefit recipients, but what about the child who is performing these gestures? Research indicates that gesturing also serves the child speaker by (1) stimulating thought, (2) connecting the concrete outside world with the child’s inner abstract thoughts, (3) reducing the cognitive load (i. e. the more a child gestures, the less he or she will have to say), and (4) facilitating an opportunity to communicate with less perceived social risk.
According to Alibali, Kita and Young’s (2000) Information-packing hypothesis as described by Jacobs and Garnham (2007), the production of gestures prepares the speaker for fluent speech. In this model the production of a representational gesture “helps speakers organize rich spatio-motoric information into packages suitable for speaking. ” Evidence of this theory comes from the results of a 2007 study conducted by Jacobs and Garnham where participants were prevented from gesturing and experienced reduced fluency in their own speech (Jacobs & Garnham, 2007).
The synergy provided by gesturing and speaking at the same time has the potential of speeding up learning, improving performance, and even facilitating the generalization or transfer of skills learned. Gesturing may also directly facilitate the encoding of long-term memory as the motor action required form more robust neural pathways. Additionally, the very act of gesturing may direct a child’s focus on the information he or she is displaying through these movements.
Gesturing can prompt children to notice hidden meanings in their own hand motions. Children who have been required to produce only partially correct gestures, according to Goldin-Meadow et al. (2009), are able to learn more than their counterparts who have been instructed to avoid gesturing. In this way, body motions may not just be involved in retrieving old knowledge, but creating new ideas as well. To distinguish causation from correlation, Cook et al. (2008) required children to gesture while learning a new concept and determined that they retained knowledge gained during instruction in comparison to children who were required to not gesture (Cook et al. 2008). Moreover, Broaders et al. (2007) determined that children shown how to move their hands in the correct rendition of a problem-solving strategy solved more math problems successfully than children instructed to move their hands in only a partially correct rendition. As a result, children told to gesture were able to convey previously unexpressed, implicit ideas, opening them up to future learning.
Of course, gesturing also serves to reduce a child’s cognitive load, preserving vital resources that he or she can direct towards other uses (Cook & Goldin-Meadow, 2006). According to Goldin-Meadow et al. (1999), gesturing during speech requires motor planning and coordination of two separate cognitive and motor systems, which some predict would increase cognitive load. On the other hand, gesturing and speech may be combined in a single integrated system that works together for effective communication and problem-solving.
Spontaneous gesture indicates a child’s readiness to learn a new task or skill. In most research mothers are the first to notice these signals because as primary caregivers, they are finely tuned into their child’s abilities (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2007). In this way, gesturing can function as a mechanism by which children reveal their thoughts to a listener, who can then adjust the interaction to focus on these thoughts to facilitate learning (Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Consequentially, children shape their own learning environments by nonverbally indicating to an adult that appropriate input in their zones of proximal development is needed. Abilities available in a child’s zone of proximal development as defined by Vygotsky include those that the child has not yet mastered, but is actively working on and are thus “ripe” for change (Goldin-Meadow & Singer, 2003).
Gesture-Speech Mismatch
Much of the communicative learning facilitated by parents is done when their children produce gesture-speech mismatches. Gesture-speech mismatches are often performed when a child is on the verge of making progress in learning a new task and offers a window into his or her thinking during this critical transitional state (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005).
A classic example of gesture-speech mismatch can be observed when children first attempt to solve the Piaget conservation task. As indicated by Goldin-Meadow and Wagner (2005), a child will initially determine the amount of water in each glass to be the same, but after pouring the contents of one into a shorter, wider cup, he or she then reasons that the volumes are now unequal. When asked to explain their answers, children will indicate their reasoning by gesturing to the differences between the heights of the liquid in each glass. By the middle childhood years, children are able to adjust their thinking to explain that while the levels of water portrayed through gesturing are not equal, the glasses in fact do contain the same amount of water.
An additional example of gesture-speech mismatch occurs when young children are asked whether the number of checkers in two identical rows are equal. Once the experimenter has spread out the checkers in one of the rows, children will then say that the number of checkers in each row are different, focusing on the examiner’s movements and gestures. The young participants may also count the checkers, physically touching each checker on both of the rows, but continue to insist that there are more differences in their numbers. Children who produce these mismatches in their explanations clearly have information relevant to solving the task and are thus at the verge of learning the task (Goldin-Meadow, 2004).
For typically developing children, speech-gesture mismatches become a powerful tool for learning. Children will first produce a single, incorrect explanation for a task. As they become more knowledge about the world around them, children will enter a conflicting stage where they produce two different procedures, one in speech and the other in gesture, and finally they will produce a single procedure that is correct (Alibali & Goldin-Meadow, 1993).
Because this path of speech-gesture mismatch is so predictable, it may serve as an early diagnostic indicator that a child’s development is deviating from the typical course. Gesture is an early marker of change and can be tracked and recorded by parents, teachers, psychologists, and physicians alike (Goldin-Meadow et al. 1999).
Gesturing in Special Populations
Despite the unprecedented insight that observers are able to glean about a child’s cognitive development, very little gesturing research has been conducted in atypically developing populations. Children with Down syndrome have been repeatedly characterized as adequate gesturers in spite of their vast deficits in expressive vocabulary. Perhaps gesturing empowers children with Down syndrome to communicate that which they are physically unable to verbalize because of mouth shape, tongue size, and other biological constraints. Iverson et al. (2003) administered the MacArthur CDI to the parents of thirty-nine children with Down syndrome, matched on the basis of comprehension and production vocabulary size. While the authors determined that their participants with Down syndrome had significantly larger gestural repertoires than their typically developing counterparts, the same procedure repeated on an Italian population of forty children with Down syndrome found this effect only in a high comprehension sample. Unlike their typically developing peers, children with Down syndrome in both studies only combined words and gestures redundantly. In other words, new information was not conveyed by gesturing; spoken language was simply repeated by gesturing.
Past research suggests that overall children with Williams syndrome have larger expressive vocabularies than those with Down syndrome, so one would expect differences in gesturing between the two groups. Bello et al. (2004) examined the accuracy of naming and the accompanying use of gestures in a picture-naming task by children with Williams syndrome. In comparison to typically developing controls, children with Williams syndrome produced more iconic gestures, showing physical, concrete items. The authors interpreted this to mean that children with Williams syndrome have specific word-finding difficulties. Moreover, children with Williams syndrome showed a higher rate of gesturing than typically developing children, including the overproduction of conventional-interactive gestures, such as “yes” and “no” (Bello et al. 2004), indicating that their social competencies were more similar to their chronologically age matched peers than other children with mental retardation (Bello et al. 2004). As this finding would suggest, those that interact with children with Williams syndrome, the “listeners”, benefit from their gesture production, but do children with Williams syndrome also learn from their own gestures?
Future Directions
With so little research being conducted on the gesturing of children with mental retardation, an entire set of experiments must be designed to gain a better insight into their communicative development and thought processes. Children with Williams syndrome are clearly able to fill the gaps in their expressive language by gesturing, but are they also able to learn about their environments through self-produced gestures? To determine the importance of gesturing as a benefit to speakers with mental retardation, researchers should first design a very basic experiment where children with Williams syndrome are asked to solve a difficult algebraic equation. Only those with Williams syndrome who fail to solve the problem will be included in the experimental design, where participants will be chronological and mental age matched and separated into two groups (control and experimental). Children with Williams syndrome in the control group will be filmed attempting to solve the algebraic equation based on verbalized instructions by the experimenter, guiding the child on the correct pathway to finding the solution. At the same time, children with Williams syndrome in the experimental group will be taught to solve the equation with the very same verbalized instructions but researchers will also encourage them to gesture towards each component of the problem as they solve them. Two weeks after their initial training session, children with Williams syndrome in both groups will be invited back to the laboratory to attempt to solve a similar algebraic equation. Researchers will film both groups and determine whether there are significant differences between the problem-solving tactics and success in the competition of each mathematics problem based on the gesturing condition.
Gesturing appears to play an important role in the education and communicative development of children of all abilities and further research must be conducted to uncover additional aspects of its use.
References
Bavelas, J. Gerwing, J. Sutton, C. & Prevost, D. (2008). Gesturing on the telephone:
Independent effects of dialogue and visibility. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 495-520.
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