Unpacking the Ontogeny of Gesture Understanding: How Movement Becomes Meaningful Across Development

Abstract

Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children's learning, memory, and thinking (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, 2003). However, it remains unknown how children distinguish gestures from other kinds of actions. In this study, 4- to 9-year-olds (n = 339) and adults (n = 50) described one of three scenes: (a) an actor moving objects, (b) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them), or (c) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants across all ages were equally able to identify actions on objects as goal directed, but the ability to identify empty-handed movements as representational actions (i.e., as gestures) increased with age and was influenced by the presence of objects, especially in older children.

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

“…Our goal was to investigate the impact that acting out the meaning of a verb, compared to gesturing about its meaning, has on how the verb is learned and generalized. With respect to learning, we found that children needed the same number of rounds to learn a verb through action as they needed to learn the verb through gesture (see Wakefield et al., , for a more thorough study of initial verb learning through action and gesture). But we found a different pattern with respect to generalization.…”

“…Objects were composed of three primary shapes, making them sufficiently complex to afford at least two distinct actions that were not obvious from their appearance alone, and were based on object designs used previously by James and Swain () and Wakefield et al. (). In videos (described below), a distinct, one‐handed action was performed on each object.…”

“…The purpose of these videos was to demonstrate that the objects could all be acted on. We know from previous work that 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children are able to interpret gesture as a representation of action (Wakefield, Novack, & Goldin‐Meadow, ). But, without the videos, children in the gesture condition might have interpreted the gestures on which they were trained as movements for their own sake, as opposed to movements intended to represent actions on objects.…”

The role of the motor system in action understanding and communication: Evidence from human infants and non‐human primates

“…Woodward and Guajardo () found that infants understand the object‐directedness of concrete actions (i.e., reaching and grasping) a few months earlier than gestures (i.e., pointing). A series of studies by Goldin‐Meadow and colleagues (Novack, Goldin‐Meadow, & Woodward, ; Wakefield, Novack, & Goldin‐Meadow, ) shows that, while children understand that gestures convey information from an early age, the ability to interpret and learn from gestures develops throughout childhood. Further, evidence for this link can be found in the work of Volterra and colleagues (see Volterra, Capirci, Caselli, Rinaldi, & Sparaci, for a review).…”

Teaching Analogical Reasoning With Co-speech Gesture Shows Children Where to Look, but Only Boosts Learning for Some

“…To understand the relation between checking in with the featural match during instruction and performance on the post-instruction trial, we took into account our finding that, in general, younger children checked in less with the featural match when they received speech + gesture instruction than speech-alone instruction, but older children did not show this difference. This distinctly different pattern of results between younger and older children motivated the use of a median split by age (see Wakefield et al, 2017 for a similar approach): we constructed two models to ask whether check-ins during instruction were predictive of performance on the post-instruction trial for older (8–11 years) and younger (4–7 years) children separately. Here, we found that, whereas older children’s check-ins with the featural match did not significantly predict their accuracy at post-instruction (β = −0.12, SE = 0.18, t = −0.66, p = 0.512), younger children’s check-ins with the featural match were predictive of their performance on the post-instruction trial: check-ins were negatively related to successful problem solving (β = −0.45, SE = 0.18, t = −2.58, p = 0.009).…”