Gesture's Role in the Learning Process

Developmental Psychology, 2003

Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech-they produce gesturespeech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third-and fourth-grade children individually in a math problem. We found that the adults offered more variable instruction to children who produced mismatches than to children who produced no mismatches-more different types of instructional strategies and more instructions that contained two different strategies, one in speech and the other in gesture. The children thus appeared to be shaping their own learning environments just by moving their hands. Gesture not only reflects a child's understanding but can play a role in eliciting input that could shape that understanding. As such, it may be part of the mechanism of cognitive change.

Child Development Perspectives, 2009

The gestures children use when they talk often reveal knowledge that they do not express in speech. Gesture is particularly likely to reveal these unspoken thoughts when children are on the verge of learning a new task. It thus reflects knowledge in child learners. But gesture can also play a role in changing the child's knowledge, indirectly through its effects on the child's communicative environment and directly through its effects on the child's cognitive state. Because gesture reflects thought and is an early marker of change, it may be possible to use it diagnostically. Gesture (or its lack) may be the first sign of future developmental difficulty. And because gesture can change thought, it may prove to be useful in the home, the classroom, and the clinic as a way to alter the pace, and perhaps the course, of learning and development. When people talk, they gesture. Even children move their hands when they speak. Evidence from school-aged children and from children at the early stages of language learning suggests that children's gestures often reflect knowledge that they have, but cannot yet express, thus providing insight into their unspoken thoughts. But there is now new evidence suggesting that gesture can do more than reflect thought-it can play a role in changing thought. First, gesture can contribute to knowledge change through its communicative effects. If a child's gestures reflect the state of the child's knowledge, those gestures could serve as a signal that the child is ready for certain kinds of input. If, in turn, listeners are sensitive to this signal, they can adjust how they interact with the child, providing input targeted to the child's knowledge state. Gesturing can thus bring about knowledge change indirectly by giving children a way to shape the input they receive.

Child Development, 2000

Gesture has privileged access to information that children know but do not say. As such, it can serve as an additional window to the mind of the developing child, one that researchers are only beginning to acknowledge. Gesture might, however, do more than merely reßect understandingÑit may be involved in the process of cognitive change itself. This question will guide research on gesture as we enter the new millennium. Gesture might contribute to change through two mechanisms which are not mutually exclusive: (1) indirectly, by communicating unspoken aspects of the learnerÕs cognitive state to potential agents of change (parents, teachers, siblings, friends); and (2) directly, by offering the learner a simpler way to express and explore ideas that may be difÞcult to think through in a verbal format, thus easing the learnerÕs cognitive burden. As a result, the next decade may well offer evidence of gestureÕs dual potential as an illuminating tool for researchers and as a facilitator of cognitive growth for learners themselves.

Annual Review of Psychology, 2013

When speakers talk, they gesture. The goal of this review is to investigate the contribution that these gestures make to how we communicate and think. Gesture can play a role in communication and thought at many timespans. We explore, in turn, gesture's contribution to how language is produced and understood in the moment; its contribution to how we learn language and other cognitive skills; and its contribution to how language is created over generations, over childhood, and on the spot. We find that the gestures speakers produce when they talk are integral to communication and can be harnessed in a number of ways. (a) Gesture reflects speakers' thoughts, often their unspoken thoughts, and thus can serve as a window onto cognition. Encouraging speakers to gesture can thus provide another route for teachers, clinicians, interviewers, etc., to better understand their communication partners. (b) Gesture can change speakers' thoughts. Encouraging gesture thus has the potential to change how students, patients, witnesses, etc., think about a problem and, as a result, alter the course of learning, therapy, or an interchange. (c) Gesture provides building blocks that can be used to construct a language. By watching how children and adults who do not already have a language put those blocks together, we can observe the process of language creation. Our hands are with us at all times and thus provide researchers and learners with an ever-present tool for understanding how we talk and think.

Developmental Science, 1999

The gestures that spontaneously occur in communicative contexts have been shown to offer insight into a child's thoughts. The information gesture conveys about what is on a child's mind will, of course, only be accessible to a communication partner if that partner can interpret gesture. Adults were asked to observe a series of children who participated`live' in a set of conservation tasks and gestured spontaneously while performing the tasks. Adults were able to glean substantive information from the children's gestures, information that was not found anywhere in their speech. Gesture-reading' did, however, have a cost ± if gesture conveyed different information from speech, it hindered the listener's ability to identify the message in speech. Thus, ordinary listeners can and do extract information from a child's gestures, even gestures that are unedited and fleeting.