R. Breckinridge Church

The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge

Abstract This study investigates two implications of frequent mismatches between gesture and speech in a childs explanations of a concept: (1) Do gesture/speech mismatches reflect a basic inconsistency in the explanatory system which underlies a childs understanding of a concept? (2) Do gesture/speech mismatches, perhaps as a consequence of this inconsistency, reflect a heightened receptivity to instruction in that concept? The Piagetian conservation task, which asks children to explain their judgments about quantity invariance, was used to test these hypotheses. Children ages 5–8 were asked to make six conservation judgments and then to explain each of those judgments. All but one of the children were found to gesture spontaneously with their spoken explanations. Children were classified into two groups according to the relationship between gesture and speech in their explanations: “Discordant” children produced many explanations in which the information conveyed in speech did not match the information conveyed in gesture; “concordant” children produced few such mismatched explanations. Study 1 sought to determine whether discordant children were less consistent in the reasoning underlying their verbal explanations of quantity invariance than were concordant children. Two indices of consistency that were independent of the discordance classifications were devised and applied to the performances of 28 children on the six conservation tasks. The discordant children were found to have significantly lower scores on both indices of consistency than the concordant children. Thus, children who frequently produced mismatched information between gesture and speech in their explanations of a concept tended to display other forms of inconsistency with respect to the explanatory systems they used to justify their beliefs about that concept. Study 2 sought to determine whether this inconsistency reflected knowledge in transition as operationalized by heightened receptivity to training. After participating in a pretest of six conservation tasks, 52 children were exposed to training in conservation. Discordant children were found to show more improvement than concordant children on a posttest containing the same 6 conservation tasks. Thus, gesture/speech discordance appears to be both a useful marker of inconsistency in the explanatory system underlying understanding of a concept and of receptivity to training in that concept.

Transitions in Concept Acquisition: Using the Hand to Read the Mind

Thoughts conveyed through gesture often differ from thoughts conveyed through speech. In this article, a model of the sources and consequences of such gesture-speech mismatches and their role during transitional periods in the acquisition of concepts is proposed. The model makes 2 major claims: (a) The transitional state is the source of gesture-speech mismatch. In gesture-speech mismatch, 2 beliefs are simultaneously expressed on the same problem--one in gesture and another in speech. This simultaneous activation of multiple beliefs characterizes the transitional knowledge state and creates gesture-speech mismatch. (b) Gesture-speech mismatch signals to the social world that a child is in a transitional state and is ready to learn. The childs spontaneous gestures index the zone of proximal development, thus providing a mechanism by which adults can calibrate their input to that childs level of understanding.

Transitional knowledge in the acquisition of concepts

These studies explore children’s conceptual knowledge as it is expressed through their verbal and gestural explanations of concepts. We build on previous work that has shown that children who produce a large proportion of gestures that do not match their verbal explanations are in transition with respect to the concept they are explaining. This gesture/speech mismatch has been called “discordance.” Previous work discovered this phenomenon with respect to 5- to 7-yearold children’s explanations of conservation problems. Study 1 shows: (I) that older children (IO to 11 years old) exhibit gesture/speech discordance with respect to another concept, understanding the equivalence relationship in mathematical equations, and; (2) that children who produce many discordant responses in their explanations of mathematical equivalence are more likely to benefit from instruction in the concept than are children who produce few such responses. Studies 2 and 3 explore the properties and usefulness of discordance as an index of transitional knowledge in a child’s acquisition of mathematical equivalence. Under any circumstance in which new concepts are acquired, there exists a mental bridge connecting the old knowledge state to the new. The studies reported here suggest that the combination of gesture and speech may be an easily observable and significantly interpretable reflection of knowledge states, both static and in flux.

How Teachers Link Ideas in Mathematics Instruction Using Speech and Gesture: A Corpus Analysis

This research investigated how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in middle school mathematics instruction. We videotaped 18 lessons (3 from each of 6 teachers), and within each, we identified linking episodes—segments of discourse in which the teacher connected mathematical ideas. For each link, we identified the modalities teachers used to express linked ideas and coded whether the content was new or review. Teachers communicated most links multimodally, typically using speech and gestures. Teachers’ gestures included depictive gestures that simulated actions and perceptual states, and pointing gestures that grounded utterances in the physical environment. Compared to links about new material, teachers were less likely to express links about review material multimodally, especially when that material had been mentioned previously. Moreover, teachers gestured at a higher rate in links about new material. Gestures are an integral part of teachers’ communication during mathematics instruction.

Is gesture-speech mismatch a general index of transitional knowledge?

Abstract When asked to explain their beliefs about a concept, some children produce gestures that convey different information from the information conveyed in their speech (i.e., gesture-speech mismatches). Moreover, it is precisely the children who produce a large proportion of gesture-speech mismatches in their explanations of a concept who are particularly “ready” to benefit from instruction in that concept, and thus may be considered to be in a transitional state with respect to the concept. Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986) and Perry, Church and Goldin-Meadow (1988) studied this phenomenon with respect to two different concepts at two different ages and found that gesture-speech mismatch reliability predicts readiness to learn in both domains. In an attempt to test further the generality of gesture-speech mismatch as an index of transitional knowledge, Stone, Webb, and Mahootian (1991) explored this phenomenon in a group of 15-year-olds working on a problem-solving task. On this task, however, gesture-speech mismatch was not found to predict transitional knowledge. We present here a theoretical framework, which makes it clear why we expect gesture-speech mismatch to be a general index of transitional knowledge, and then use this framework to motivate our methodological practices for establishing gesture-speech mismatch as a predictor of transitional knowledge. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that, if these practices had been used by Stone et al., they too would have found that gesture-speech mismatch predicts transitional knowledge.

Using Gesture and Speech to Capture Transitions in Learning

Abstract The present study compared 3 measures of knowledge variability to determine which measure predicts learning. Eighty-six children between the ages of 5 and 8 years participated in a pretest-training–posttest study of conservation understanding. Gesture-speech mismatches predicted learning better than both an across-task measure and a within-task measure of variability in speech explanations of conservation. This suggests that transitional knowledge may be best characterized as the simultaneous activation of multiple representations distributed across modalities. Implications for how gesture-speech mismatches may elucidate mechanisms underlying cognitive change are discussed.

Temporal synchrony between speech, action and gesture during language production

Researchers have theorised that speech and gesture are integrated in communication. We ask whether this integrated relationship is indexed by a unique temporal link between speech and gesture. University students performed videotaped tasks that elicited: (1) speech and action descriptions about how to act on objects and (2) speech and gesture descriptions about how to act on objects. Integration was indexed by measuring the onset of speech with actions and speech with gestures (in milliseconds), with smaller differences reflecting a greater degree of synchrony. One hundred per cent of the subjects gestured in the gesture condition and performed actions in the action condition. Speech and gesture were more tightly synchronised than speech with action. The greater synchrony between gesture and speech suggests that the two could be uniquely designed to work together for the purpose of communication.

Hormonal and Ecological Contributions toward Interpersonal Intimacy in Couples

Intimacy is positively associated with marital stability and the frequency of sexual behavior of the couple. Although many studies of intimacy have been conducted, very few have included environmerital factors. The majority of research has been conducted in contrived laboratory settings, or with retrospective questionnaires. Furthermore, studies addressing hormonal contributions toward couple intimacy have focused only on the premenstrual phase of the female’s menstrual cycle. As such, results of these studies are likely to be biased because they are: 1) not representative of an individual’s overall experience ofintimacy; 2 ) likely to be influenced by the need to respond in a socially expected manner; and 3) biased toward individuals who are better able to articulate their thoughts, which could contribute toward some of the reported sex differences in intimacy. In order to reduce these biases, the present study employed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). This ecologically valid and reliable methodology3 requires that participants wear electronic pagers. A transmitter is used to signal participants at random times during the day, at which time they fill out questionnaires as previously instructed. Answers to questions such as, “Who were you with?” and “Where were you?” provide information about the social context, and physical location; respectively, two major features in the ecology of an individual’s everyday life. In order to correlate these ecological features of the environment with perceptions of interpersonal intimacy, subjects were also asked to respond to the question, “Thinking about your partner, how close d o you feel toward him/her?” each time they were paged. Intimacy is often described by feelings of closeness, and feelings of closeness are theorized to underlie intimacy f ~ r r n a t i o n . ~ . ~

Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better

During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons about links between linear equations and corresponding graphs. Eighty-two middle-school students completed a pretest, viewed a video lesson, and then completed a posttest comparable to the pretest. In all of the video lessons, the teacher explained the links between equations and graphs in speech. The lessons varied in whether the teacher referred to the equations in gesture and in whether she referred to the graphs in gesture, yielding four conditions: neither equations nor graphs, equations only, graphs only, and both equations and graphs. In all conditions, the gestures were redundant with speech, in the sense that the referents of the gestures were also mentioned in speech (e.g., pointing to “2” while saying “2”). Students showed substantial learning in all conditions. However, students learned less when the teacher referred to the equations in gesture than when she did not. This was not the case for gesture to graphs. These findings are discussed in terms of the processing implications of redundancy between gesture and speech, and the possibility of “trade-offs” in attention to the visual representations. The findings underscore the need for a more nuanced view of the role of teachers’ gestures in students’ comprehension and learning.