About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 11. Language, Communication

Abstract

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Gestures, dynamic hand or arm movements, are a rich form of nonverbal communication that can be used throughout life (e.g. Cook, 2018; Dargue et al. 2019). Most children initially use gestures as their primary form of communication before transitioning fully to speech (e.g. Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). It has been found that producing or viewing gestures with speech can be beneficial for both the speaker as well as listener in various learning and comprehension tasks (e.g. Dargue & Sweller, 2020). However, it is still unclear how gestures assist in these different contexts.
One possible explanation is that gestures help to build a better mental representation; Adding gestures to speech encourages the listener to build more robust representations as they listen. This claim builds on the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework. GSA posits that gestures are a reflection of motor activity that occurs in response to thinking or speaking about mental simulations for motor actions or perceptual states (Hostetter & Alibali, 2019). While GSA provides an explanation of why people gesture, it does not directly address the impact of gestures on listeners. The current study builds on this theory by examining whether, on the receiver's end, gestures encourage similar mental simulations of motor actions and perceptual states, leading to mental simulations that allow listeners to make causal inferences and more detailed memories (Nathan & Martinez, 2015).
To test whether the incorporation of gestures assists both inference making and memory, a narrative comprehension task was used. A total of 15 children (64.81 months, 10 F) viewed two prerecorded stories and were asked inference questions during the narration as well as memory questions after it. Children in the gesture condition (8 total, 64.62 months), saw the narrator gesture at twelve key points throughout the two narratives (e.g. when the narrator says “...a big friendly animal…” they raise their arms up overheard and move them slightly outwards when they say big). Children in the no-gesture condition (7 total, 64.45 months) heard the exact same stories but with no gestures at all.
Children in the gesture condition (M = 0.712, SD = 0.166) remember significantly more than children in the no-gesture condition (M = .506, SD = 0.192, p = 0.048) as seen in Figure 1. There was no significant difference between gesture (M = 0.762, SD = 0.151) and no-gesture conditions (M = .730, SD = 0.090, p = 0.699) in children’s accuracy for inference questions. However, children’s responses provide rich insight into their mental representation. Children in the gesture condition provided answers that were more consistent to each other, whereas the children in the no-gesture condition had more variability in their responses. Additionally, children in the gesture condition provided explanations that were connected to the specific gestures that they had seen, as shown in examples from Table 1. These findings offer new insights into the facilitatory role of gestures and the mechanisms behind it during narrative comprehension.

Author information

Author	Role
Chelsea Brown, University of Colorado Boulder	Presenting author
Eliana Colunga, University of Colorado Boulder Department of Psychology and Neuroscience	Non-presenting author

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