Susan Goldin-Meadow

Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development

In development, children often use gesture to communicate before they use words. The question is whether these gestures merely precede language development or are fundamentally tied to it. We examined 10 children making the transition from single words to two-word combinations and found that gesture had a tight relation to the childrens lexical and syntactic development. First, a great many of the lexical items that each child produced initially in gesture later moved to that childs verbal lexicon. Second, children who were first to produce gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements in a proposition (point at bird and say “nap”) were also first to produce two-word combinations (“bird nap”). Changes in gesture thus not only predate but also predict changes in language, suggesting that early gesture may be paving the way for future developments in language.

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.

Gesturing makes learning last

The gestures children spontaneously produce when explaining a task predict whether they will subsequently learn that task. Why? Gesture might simply reflect a childs readiness to learn a particular task. Alternatively, gesture might itself play a role in learning the task. To investigate these alternatives, we experimentally manipulated childrens gesture during instruction in a new mathematical concept. We found that requiring children to gesture while learning the new concept helped them retain the knowledge they had gained during instruction. In contrast, requiring children to speak, but not gesture, while learning the concept had no effect on solidifying learning. Gesturing can thus play a causal role in learning, perhaps by giving learners an alternative, embodied way of representing new ideas. We may be able to improve childrens learning just by encouraging them to move their hands.

Why people gesture when they speak

People use gestures when they talk, but is this behaviour learned from watching others move their hands when talking? Individuals who are blind from birth never see such gestures and so have no model for gesturing. But here we show that congenitally blind speakers gesture despite their lack of a visual model, even when they speak to a blind listener. Gestures therefore require neither a model nor an observant partner.

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.

Gesturing Gives Children New Ideas About Math

How does gesturing help children learn? Gesturing might encourage children to extract meaning implicit in their hand movements. If so, children should be sensitive to the particular movements they produce and learn accordingly. Alternatively, all that may matter is that children move their hands. If so, they should learn regardless of which movements they produce. To investigate these alternatives, we manipulated gesturing during a math lesson. We found that children required to produce correct gestures learned more than children required to produce partially correct gestures, who learned more than children required to produce no gestures. This effect was mediated by whether children took information conveyed solely in their gestures and added it to their speech. The findings suggest that body movements are involved not only in processing old ideas, but also in creating new ones. We may be able to lay foundations for new knowledge simply by telling learners how to move their hands.

Differences in Early Gesture Explain SES Disparities in Child Vocabulary Size at School Entry

Children from low–socioeconomic status (SES) families, on average, arrive at school with smaller vocabularies than children from high-SES families. In an effort to identify precursors to, and possible remedies for, this inequality, we videotaped 50 children from families with a range of different SES interacting with parents at 14 months and assessed their vocabulary skills at 54 months. We found that children from high-SES families frequently used gesture to communicate at 14 months, a relation that was explained by parent gesture use (with speech controlled). In turn, the fact that children from high-SES families have large vocabularies at 54 months was explained by childrens gesture use at 14 months. Thus, differences in early gesture help to explain the disparities in vocabulary that children bring with them to school.

Making Children Gesture Brings Out Implicit Knowledge and Leads to Learning

Speakers routinely gesture with their hands when they talk, and those gestures often convey information not found anywhere in their speech. This information is typically not consciously accessible, yet it provides an early sign that the speaker is ready to learn a particular task (S. Goldin-Meadow, 2003). In this sense, the unwitting gestures that speakers produce reveal their implicit knowledge. But what if a learner was forced to gesture? Would those elicited gestures also reveal implicit knowledge and, in so doing, enhance learning? To address these questions, the authors told children to gesture while explaining their solutions to novel math problems and examined the effect of this manipulation on the expression of implicit knowledge in gesture and on learning. The authors found that, when told to gesture, children who were unable to solve the math problems often added new and correct problem-solving strategies, expressed only in gesture, to their repertoires. The authors also found that when these children were given instruction on the math problems later, they were more likely to succeed on the problems than children told not to gesture. Telling children to gesture thus encourages them to convey previously unexpressed, implicit ideas, which, in turn, makes them receptive to instruction that leads to learning.

Language in the two-year old ☆

Abstract Two stages in the vocabulary development of two-year-olds are reported. In the earlier Receptive stage, the child says many fewer nouns than he understands and says no verbs at all although he understands many. The child then begins to close the comprehension/production gap, entering a Productive stage in which he says virtually all the nouns he understands plus his first verbs. Frequency and length of word combinations correlate with these vocabulary stages.