Gesture in Instruction: Evidence from Live and Video Lessons

Previous studies have shown that teachers’ gestures are beneficial for student learning. In this research, we investigate whether teachers’ gestures have comparable effects in face-to-face live instruction and video-based instruction. We provided sixty-three 7–10 year old students with instruction about mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 4 + 5 = __ + 5). Students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design that varied (1) instruction medium (video vs. live), and (2) instruction modality (speech vs. speech + gesture). There was no main effect of medium: The same amount of learning occurred whether instruction was done live or on video. There was a main effect of modality: Speech instruction accompanied by gesture resulted in significantly more learning and transfer than instruction conveyed through speech only. Gesture’s effect on instruction was stronger for video instruction than live instruction. These findings suggest that there may be a limit to gesture’s role in communication that results in student learning.     

Unspoken Diversity: Cultural Differences in Gestures

This paper describes the use of video to explore cultural differences in gestures. Video recordings were used to capture a large sample of international gestures, and these are edited into a documentary video, A World of Gestures: Culture and Nonverbal Communication. This paper describes the approach and methodology used. A number of specific questions are examined: Are there universally understood hand gestures?; Are there universal categories of gestures—i.e., universal messages with unique instances in each society?; Can the exact same gesture have opposite meanings in two cultures?; Can individuals articulate and explain the gestures common in their culture?; How can video methods provide “visual replication” of nuanced behaviors such as gestures?; Are there gender differences in knowing or performing gestures?; and finally, Is global diversity collapsing toward Western gestural forms under the onslaught of cultural imperialism? The research findings suggest that there are both cultural “differences” and also cultural “meta-differences”—more profound differences involving deeply embedded categories of meaning that make cultures unique.     

Attention to Speech-Accompanying Gestures: Eye Movements and Information Uptake

There is growing evidence that addressees in interaction integrate the semantic information conveyed by speakers’ gestures. Little is known, however, about whether and how addressees’ attention to gestures and the integration of gestural information can be modulated. This study examines the influence of a social factor (speakers’ gaze to their own gestures), and two physical factors (the gesture’s location in gesture space and gestural holds) on addressees’ overt visual attention to gestures (direct fixations of gestures) and their uptake of gestural information. It also examines the relationship between gaze and uptake. The results indicate that addressees’ overt visual attention to gestures is affected both by speakers’ gaze and holds but for different reasons, whereas location in space plays no role. Addressees’ uptake of gesture information is only influenced by speakers’ gaze. There is little evidence of a direct relationship between addressees’ direct fixations of gestures and their uptake.     

The Organization of Words and Symbolic Gestures in 18‐Month‐Olds’ Lexicons: Evidence From a Disambiguation Task

Infants’ early communicative repertoires include both words and symbolic gestures. The current study examined the extent to which infants organize words and gestures in a single unified lexicon. As a window into lexical organization, eighteen‐month‐olds’ (N = 32) avoidance of word–gesture overlap was examined and compared with avoidance of word–word overlap. The current study revealed that when presented with novel words, infants avoided lexical overlap, mapping novel words onto novel objects. In contrast, when presented with novel gestures, infants sought overlap, mapping novel gestures onto familiar objects. The results suggest that infants do not treat words and gestures as equivalent lexical items and that during a period of development when word and symbolic gesture processing share many similarities, important differences also exist between these two symbolic forms.     

A parent gesture intervention as a means to increase parent declarative pointing and child vocabulary

This study examined whether a brief parent gesture training resulted in a change in the communicative intent of pointing gestures used by parents of infants from age 10–12 months and whether specific types of points (declarative vs. imperative) were more or less likely to predict later child language skill at 18 months. Compared to parents who were randomized to the control group, parents in the intervention group produced significantly more declarative pointing gestures as a result of the intervention. Moreover, parents’ use of declarative points at 12 months was predictive of later child vocabulary comprehension at 18 months. These findings suggest that a short-term parent training can have important effects on the communicative intentions conveyed through gesture which predict vocabulary development.     

Representational Gesture,Pointing Gesture,and Memory Recall of Preschool Children

This study investigated the effects of two different types of hand gestures on memory recall of preschool children. Experiment 1 found that children who were instructed to use representational gestures while retelling an unfamiliar story retrieved more information about the story than children who were asked to hold their hands still. In addition, children who engaged in some forms of bodily movements other than hand gestures also recalled better. Experiment 2 showed that a simpler and more basic form of gesture, the pointing gesture, had a similar effect on recollecting and retelling the details of a story. The findings provide evidence for the beneficial effects of hand gestures, both representational gestures and pointing gestures, on cognitive processes such as memory retrieval and verbal communication for preschool aged children.     

Quantity and Quality of Gestural Input: Caregivers’ Sensitivity Predicts Caregiver–Infant Bidirectional Communication Through Gestures

Children's use of pointing and symbolic gestures—early communication skills which predict later language—is influenced by frequency of adults’ gestures. However, we wonder whether, like language, the sensitivity of adult–child interactions is also important for encouraging child gesturing, rather than simply quantity of adult gestural input. Furthermore, children's use of gestures influences qualities of adult–child interaction, eliciting greater responsiveness and richer communication. Thus, we investigated the moderating role of nonparental caregiver sensitivity on the relationship between caregivers’ and infants’ use of pointing and symbolic gestures. We observed 10 infants (ages 6–19 months) over 8 months with a total of 24 student caregivers completing short‐term internships, recording adult and child use of pointing and symbolic gestures. We used longitudinal growth models to examine change in gesturing and moderating roles of caregiver sensitivity in the relations between caregiver and child gesturing behavior. Caregivers’ sensitivity moderated effects of caregivers’ symbolic gestures on infants’ pointing and symbolic gestures, and the effects of infants’ pointing and symbolic gesture frequency on caregivers’ gesture use. Thus, caregivers’ gestures are most effective in supporting child gestures when in the context of sensitive interactions. Sensitivity is central to supporting children's early communicative behaviors, including pointing and symbolic gestures.     

The Relation Between Gesture and Speech in Congenitally Blind and Sighted Language-Learners

Gesture is widely regarded to play an important role in communication, both in conjunction with and independent of speech. Indeed, gesture is known to develop even before the onset of spoken words. However, little is known about the communicative conditions under which gesture emerges. The aim of this study was to explore the role of vision in early gesturing. We examined gesture development in 5 congenitally blind and 5 sighted toddlers videotaped longitudinally between the ages of 14 and 28 months in their homes while engaging in free play with a parent or experimenter. All of the blind children were found to produce at least some gestures during the one-word stage of language development. However, gesture production was relatively low among the blind children relative to their sighted peers. Moreover, although blind and sighted children produced the same overall set of gesture types, the distribution of gesture types across categories differed. In addition, blind children used gestures primarily to communicate about objects that were nearby, while sighted children used them for nearby as well as distally located objects. These findings suggest that gesture may play different roles in the language-learning process for sighted and blind children. Nevertheless, they also make it clear that gesture is a robust phenomenon of early communicative development, emerging even in the absence of experience with a visual model.     

Multimodal representational gestures in the transition to multi-word productions

The aim of this study was to analyze the use of representational gestures from a multimodal point of view in the transition from one-word to multi-word constructions. Twenty-one Spanish-speaking children were observed longitudinally at 18, 21, 24, and 30 months of age. We analyzed the production of deictic, symbolic, and conventional gestures and their coordination with different verbal elements. Moreover, we explored the relationship between gestural multimodal and unimodal productions and independent measures of language development. Results showed that gesture production remains stable in the period studied. Whereas deictic gestures are frequent and mostly multimodal from the beginning, conventional gestures are rare and mainly unimodal. Symbolic gestures are initially unimodal, but between 24 and 30 months of age, this pattern reverses, with more multimodal symbolic gestures than unimodal. In addition, the frequency of multimodal representational gestures at specific ages seems to be positively related to independent measures of vocabulary and morphosyntax development. By contrast, the production of unimodal representational gestures appears negatively related to these measures. Our results suggest that multimodal representational gestures could have a facilitating role in the process of learning to combine meanings for communicative goals.     

The Role of Gesture in Children's Comprehension of Spoken Language:Now They Need It, Now They Don't

Two experiments investigated gesture as a form of external support for spoken language comprehension. In both experiments, children selected blocks according to a set of videotaped instructions. Across trials, the instructions were given using no gesture, gestures that reinforced speech, and gestures that conflicted with speech. Experiment 1 used spoken messages that were complex for preschool children but not for kindergarten children. Reinforcing gestures facilitated speech comprehension for preschool children but not for kindergarten children, and conflicting gestures hindered comprehension for kindergarten children but not for preschool children. Experiment 2 tested preschool children with simpler spoken messages. Unlike Experiment 1, preschool children's comprehension was not facilitated by reinforcing gestures. However, children's comprehension also was not hindered by conflicting gestures. Thus, the effects of gesture on speech comprehension depend both on the relation of gesture to speech, and on the complexity of the spoken message.     

Exploring Infant Gesture and Joint Attention as Related Constructs and as Predictors of Later Language

In infancy, use of gesture and the ability to engage in joint attention with others both predict later language development. Conceptually, gesture and joint attention abilities may reflect a similar underlying social‐communicative skill. However, these abilities are often studied separately. Despite the fact that gesture is often used in episodes of joint attention, little is known about the degree to which measures of gesture use and joint attention ability are associated with one another or how they similarly, or differentially, predict children's language abilities. Participants in this study were 53 infants. At 12 months, multiple measures of infants’ gesture use were gleaned from a free–play interaction with a parent. Infants’ responding to and initiating joint attention were measured via the Early Social‐Communicative Scales (Mundy et al., 2003). Infants’ expressive and receptive language was measured at 24 months with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995). A factor analysis including gesture and joint attention measures indicated that at 12 months, joint attention, particularly responding to joint attention, reflects a similar underlying construct with infant gesture use, yet they uniquely predict later language ability.     

The context of infants' giving gestures in mother-infant dyads: Typical giving gestures and those contingent on exploration and play

This study aimed to focus on a niche that has not yet been investigated in infants' gesture studies that is the effect of the prior context of one specific gestural behavior (gives) on maternal behavior. For this purpose, we recruited 23 infants at 11 and 13 months of age yielded 246 giving gesture bouts that were performed in three contexts: typical when the object was offered immediately, contingent on exploration, and contingent on play. The analysis revealed that maternal responses to infants' giving gestures varied and were affected by their age and gesture context. Hence, mothers amended their responses according to the background that generated each gesture. The number of verbal responses to infants' giving gestures decreased as the infants aged, whereas the number of pretense responses increased. For infants aged 11 months, mothers generally provided motor responses to typical gestures. However, for infants aged 13 months, this trend declined and was replaced by a strong positive correlation between giving gestures contingent on play and verbal responses. We concluded that the type of activity with objects prior to employing giving gestures could enhance infants' symbolic skills because caregivers monitor the contingent act that yields the gesture that shapes their response.     

How What We See and What We Know Influence Iconic Gesture Production

In face-to-face communication, speakers typically integrate information acquired through different sources, including what they see and what they know, into their communicative messages. In this study, we asked how these different input sources influence the frequency and type of iconic gestures produced by speakers during a communication task, under two degrees of task complexity. Specifically, we investigated whether speakers gestured differently when they had to describe an object presented to them as an image or as a written word (input modality) and, additionally, when they were allowed to explicitly name the object or not (task complexity). Our results show that speakers produced more gestures when they attended to a picture. Further, speakers more often gesturally depicted shape information when attended to an image, and they demonstrated the function of an object more often when they attended to a word. However, when we increased the complexity of the task by forbidding speakers to name the target objects, these patterns disappeared, suggesting that speakers may have strategically adapted their use of iconic strategies to better meet the task’s goals. Our study also revealed (independent) effects of object manipulability on the type of gestures produced by speakers and, in general, it highlighted a predominance of molding and handling gestures. These gestures may reflect stronger motoric and haptic simulations, lending support to activation-based gesture production accounts.     

How Do We Communicate About Pain? A Systematic Analysis of the Semantic Contribution of Co-speech Gestures in Pain-focused Conversations

The purpose of the present study was to investigate co-speech gesture use during communication about pain. Speakers described a recent pain experience and the data were analyzed using a ‘semantic feature approach’ to determine the distribution of information across gesture and speech. This analysis revealed that a considerable proportion of pain-focused talk was accompanied by gestures, and that these gestures often contained more information about pain than speech itself. Further, some gestures represented information that was hardly represented in speech at all. Overall, these results suggest that gestures are integral to the communication of pain and need to be attended to if recipients are to obtain a fuller understanding of the pain experience and provide help and support to pain sufferers.     

Mental Imagery and Production of Hand Gestures While Speaking in Younger and Older Adults

Speech and conversational hand gestures were recorded during interviews of 23 younger (M = 21 years) and 19 older adults (M = 70 years). Three kinds of questions were used in order to activate either visual images, motor images, or no mental image (abstract topics). On average, the rate of gesture production did not differ in younger and older adults, but it was significantly influenced by imagery conditions. Gesture production was higher in the motor than in the visual imagery condition, and lowest in the abstract condition. A significant interaction between age and imagery conditions influenced the proportion of representational gestures, which were relatively less frequent in older adults, especially in the visual imagery condition. Content analysis of verbal responses showed that imagery values did not differ in younger and older adults, but that concrete words were less frequent in responses to abstract questions than in the two other conditions. The implications of these results concerning the mechanisms of gesture production and the age-related changes in conversational behavior are discussed.     

Spiritual but not religious seek unrestricted connection to selves,others, and earth: Formative research on the explosive growth of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization

In the last half century, we have observed an explosive growth in individuals who identify as spiritual but not religious. Today, over one in four U.S. adults fall into this category. This phenomenon is an influential component of our modern and changing society, as spiritual beliefs are associated with health, well-being, goals, feelings, and attitudes. In this formative research study, we apply the public relations’ approach of Sense-Making of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization to explore how these individuals define themselves, how their beliefs influence their behaviors (such as political, environmental, communal) and how they feel they are perceived by those around them. Amongst others, our main findings reveal that the spiritual but not religious have disparate specific beliefs and often struggle or resist articulating who they are, yet more broadly share a common belief in connection to others, the natural environment, and one’s self. The majority emphasize acceptance, tolerance, compassion, and the importance of each individual embracing their own spiritual positions. The participants report feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, or ignored by others and media, and that their behaviors (perspective on the world, actions, political ideologies, etc) are influenced by their spiritual beliefs.     

Positive and negative tie perceptual accuracy: Pollyanna principle vs. negative asymmetry explanations

We examine the affective content of ties and explore whether negative affective tie content is systematically advantaged or disadvantaged when recalling the social network as compared to positive affective tie content. We test this in three workgroups from two organizations and analyze differences in perceptual accuracy comparing negative and positive affective tie perception. We theorize that ego will be more accurate for others’ positive than negative ties due to generalized positivity bias, or the Pollyanna principle. We also theorize that ego will be more accurate for their own negative ties due to negative asymmetry perspective, as ego will attend more to those ties that pose a personal threat. Findings suggest that observers were more accurate overall about their own and others’ positive compared to negative affective ties. We conclude that the Pollyanna principle is an important factor in explaining perceptions in naturalistic cognitive networks. Supplementary analysis showed that negative ties were more likely to be missed and imagined and having a valenced tie toward another person influences perceptions of that persons’ network ties. Finally, we find that balanced and imbalanced triads were also important factors of relative accuracy. The study’s contribution, limitations, and future research are also discussed.