Gestures Help Children, But Not Adults In Recall, Study
Christopher Philip
Nonverbal behaviours including hand gestures is thought to be integral in maintaining attention, colouring language, illustrating concepts as well as assisting in memory recall, comprehension, even in building rapport.
Gesture in language include deictic, metaphoric and iconic. Deictic gestures include pointing, and occurs while conveying directional information helping to orient the listener. Iconic gestures evoke images which directly relate to words. For example, a person might make the shape of a ball with their hands. Metaphoric gestures also evoke images, but of a more abstract concept. For example, the open palm rotates left and right to represent “almost.” Nonrepresentational hand gesture, also called “beat gestures” are rhythmic hand movements that serve to punctuate thoughts or emphasis points in speech.
Want to learn more about body language quickly? Take a Video Course!
Gesture has proven to be valuable in conveying directions to others. So for example, a person might use one hand to represent a landmark, and the other how to navigate around it.
Previous research has shown that children as young as 12 months comprehend deictic and iconic gestures – as is the case with the use of baby sign language. However, little is understood about the use of beat gestures by children.
The Current Study
In the current study Australian researchers Elizabeth Austin and Naomi Sweller, set out to examine the effectiveness of beat gestures on the ability of children and adults to recall information.
Based on current evidence, the researchers postulated that using gesture during learning would improve later recall.
Both children and adults participated in the study. They were divided into 3 groups. One were taught with beat, deictic, iconic and metaphoric gestures (combined gesture condition), beat gesture alone, or no gesture.
Here is an example of the use of gestures from the procedure:
[Diectic] “At the police station” (researcher points at the police station with right hand as the words “police station” are verbalized), [Iconic]“Lego man shakes hands” (researcher repeatedly moves right hand up/down with open palm facing left, fingers extended horizontally away from the body as the words “shakes hands” are verbalized) [Beat] “with the policeman and then starts walking” (researcher performs a beat gesture as the words “starts walking” are verbalized), [Metaphoric] “passing in front of the windmill” (both palms facing chest, researcher makes an arc in the air, hands to finish in the same orientation approximately 20 cm away from chest when the words “in front of” are verbalized).
Results of The Study
The results showed that as it relates to recall, the children benefited from the use of gesture while the adults did not. When more gestures were added, the children benefited more. Thus using multiple gestures including all four types proved to be most useful as the children learned and recalled the most.
The researchers suggest that children likely benefit with increased attention, rapport building, and illustration of spatial concepts and conveyance of additional information.
According to the GSA framework, the presentation of representational gestures activates visual and motor mental representations of the spatial message to be recalled, improving recall
The researchers admit that other studies have shown the benefits of beat gestures on recall when single words are used, rather than the situations presented in this study. They also admit that the relative task difficulty was such that gesture was more superfluous than necessary.
The Take Away Message
The addition of gesture when interacting and teaching children is highly recommended. As when no gesture was used, children did not recall as well as when gesture was used. Also, the more gesture used, the greater the children performed.
Adults did not perform noticeably different between the gesture and no gesture condition, although this may be related to the relative ease of task. Like children, if adults where given a more difficult task, it may prove to be more successful to teach them with gesture than without.
Want to learn more about body language quickly? Take a Video Course!
Resources
Austin, Elizabeth E. and Naomi Sweller. Presentation and Production: The Role of Gesture in Spatial Communication. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 2019. 122: 92-103.
To learn more about decoding lying in people sign up for “How to be a Human Lie Detector.” The course is hosted by Vanessa Van Edwards but fully sponsored by Body Language Project.