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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 child's spontaneous gestures index the zone of proximal development, thus providing a mechanism by which adults can calibrate their input to that child's level of understanding.

Most theories of pragmatics take as the basic unit of communication the verbal content of spoken or written utterances. However, many of these theories have overlooked the fact that important information about an utterance's meaning can be conveyed nonverbally. In the present study, we investigate the pragmatic role that hand gestures play in language comprehension and memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that people were more likely to interpret an utterance as an indirect request when speech was accompanied by a relevant pointing gesture than when speech or gesture was presented alone. Following up on this, Experiment 3 supported the idea that speech and gesture mutually disambiguate the meanings of one another. Finally, Experiment 4 generalized the findings to different types of speech acts (recollection of events) with a different type of gesture (iconic gestures). The results from these experiments suggest that broader units of analysis beyond the verbal message may be needed in studying pragmatic understanding.

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The present study compares children's and adults' ability to detect information that is conveyed through representational hand gestures. Eighteen children (M = 10 years, 1 month) and 18 college undergraduates watched videotaped stimuli of children verbally and gesturally explaining their reasoning in a problem-solving situation. A recall procedure was used to assess whether children and adults could detect information conveyed in the stimulus children's gesture and speech. Results showed that children and adults recalled information that was conveyed through representational gestures. In addition, "mismatching" gesture negatively affected the precision of speech recall for adults. However, this negative effect on speech recall was absent for children.

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Teachers’ gestures are an integral part of their instructional communication. In this study, we provided a teacher with a tutorial about ways to use gesture in connecting ideas in mathematics instruction, and we asked the teacher to teach sample lessons about slope and intercept before and after this tutorial. In response to the tutorial, the teacher enhanced his communication about links between ideas by increasing the frequency with which he expressed linked ideas multi-modally (i.e., using both speech and gesture), and by increasing the frequency with which he used simultaneous gestures to linked ideas. We then presented videos of a lesson the teacher provided before the tutorial (thebaselinelesson) and one he provided after the tutorial (theenhanced-gesturelesson) to 42 seventh-grade students and assessed their learning. Students who received the enhanced-gesture lesson displayed greater learning about y-intercept than did students who received the baseline lesson. Thus, students learned more when their teacher had learned to gesture effectively.