Gesture for generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects

Wakefield, Elizabeth M.; Hall, Casey; James, Karin H.; Goldin‐Meadow, Susan

doi:10.1111/desc.12656

Cited by 42 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…20 Future work is needed to explore whether children who learned through speech 1 gesture also show activation in regions associated with abstraction. If so, this would corroborate behavioral evidence 18,21 revealing that learning through gesture supports generalization better than learning through action on objects.…”

Section: Neurocognitive Underpinnings and Theorysupporting

confidence: 74%

“…However, they were more likely to correctly identify "ratching" when it was performed on a new object if they had learned via gesture than via action. 18 In other words, seeing gesture (in this case, an iconic gesture that portrays an aspect of the word's meaning) increases the likelihood that a child will be able to generalize a newly learned word to a novel context.…”

Section: Theoretical Approaches For Intervention Learning From Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using Gesture To Identify and Address Early Concerns About Language and Pragmatics

Goldin‐Meadow

2020

Pediatrics

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Speakers and signers naturally and spontaneously gesture when they use language to communicate. These gestures not only play a central role in how language is used in social situations but also offer insight into speakers' and signers' cognitive processes. The goals of this article are twofold: (1) to document how gesture can be used to identify concerns in language development and (2) to illustrate how gesture can be used to address those concerns, particularly with respect to pragmatic development. These goals are explored in this article, with a focus on deaf and/or hard of hearing (DHH) children. Medical providers and allied health professionals, as well as educators and parents, can use the information gleaned from the gestures of DHH children to determine if intervention is needed. Gesture can also be used to design interventions, including interventions in which children who are DHH are presented gestures in combination with speech or signs and interventions in which they are encouraged to gesture themselves. Children's gestures not only increase their learning potential but also create opportunities for medical and health professionals, as well as educators and parents, to gain access to a DHH child's unspoken and unsigned ideas, capitalizing on the opportunity to provide intervention when it is likely to be effective.

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Section: Neurocognitive Underpinnings and Theorysupporting

confidence: 74%

Section: Theoretical Approaches For Intervention Learning From Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Gesture To Identify and Address Early Concerns About Language and Pragmatics

Goldin‐Meadow

2020

Pediatrics

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“…These iconic gestures can also play a role in word learning. One study taught toddlers novel words for novel actions (Wakefield, Hall, James, & Goldin-Meadow, 2018). The children were told either to produce a gesture for an action while learning a nonsense word for that action or to produce the action itself while learning the word.…”

Section: Learning Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Taking a Hands-on Approach to Learning

Goldin‐Meadow

2018

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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Because our hands are always with us, gesture has the potential to boost learning in all children and thus reduce inequalities in achievement in language and math. Key Points • • When people talk, they gesture, and these gestures can convey substantive information that is related, but not always identical, to the information conveyed in speech. • • Gesture thus offers listeners insight into a speaker's unspoken cognition. • • But gesture can do more than reflect cognition-it can change cognition early in development when children are learning language and also later in development when children learn about math. • • These findings have implications for practice because our hands are always with us and gesture requires little infrastructure to implement in teaching situations. • • Gesture thus has the potential to boost learning in all children and perhaps reduce inequalities in achievement in language and math.

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“…Seeing gesture as opposed to whole-body enactments boosted children's memory for how the actor moved. Further, Wakefield, Hall, James, and Goldin-Meadow (2018) found that seeing (or producing) gesture led children to more adeptly generalize the meaning of a novel verb than seeing (or producing) action. Thus, it appears that gesture may be uniquely situated to highlight information about manner of movement or particular movement patterns, whereas action emphasizes end state and goal-oriented parts of a movement event.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Learning From Gesture and Action: An Investigation of Memory for Where Objects Went and How They Got There

2020

Self Cite

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Speakers often use gesture to demonstrate how to perform actions—for example, they might show how to open the top of a jar by making a twisting motion above the jar. Yet it is unclear whether listeners learn as much from seeing such gestures as they learn from seeing actions that physically change the position of objects (i.e., actually opening the jar). Here, we examined participants' implicit and explicit understanding about a series of movements that demonstrated how to move a set of objects. The movements were either shown with actions that physically relocated each object or with gestures that represented the relocation without touching the objects. Further, the end location that was indicated for each object covaried with whether the object was grasped with one or two hands. We found that memory for the end location of each object was better after seeing the physical relocation of the objects, that is, after seeing action, than after seeing gesture, regardless of whether speech was absent (Experiment 1) or present (Experiment 2). However, gesture and action built similar implicit understanding of how a particular handgrasp corresponded with a particular end location. Although gestures miss the benefit of showing the end state of objects that have been acted upon, the data show that gestures are as good as action in building knowledge of how to perform an action.

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Gesture for generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects

Cited by 42 publications

References 51 publications

Using Gesture To Identify and Address Early Concerns About Language and Pragmatics

Using Gesture To Identify and Address Early Concerns About Language and Pragmatics

Taking a Hands-on Approach to Learning

Learning From Gesture and Action: An Investigation of Memory for Where Objects Went and How They Got There

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