Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis (...) to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Integrating different perspectives is a sophisticated strategy for developing constructive interactions in collaborative problem solving. However, cognitive aspects such as individuals’ knowledge and bias often obscure group consensus and produce conflict. This study investigated collaborative problem solving, focusing on a group member interacting with another member having a different perspective. It was predicted that mavericks might mitigate disadvantages and facilitate perspective taking during problem solving. Thus, 344 university students participated in two laboratory-based experiments by engaging in a simple rule-discovery task (...) that raised conflicts among perspectives. They interacted with virtual partners whose conversations were controlled by multiple conversational agents. Results show that when participants interacted with a maverick during the task, they were able to take others’ perspectives and integrate different perspectives to solve the problem. Moreover, when participants interacted in groups with a positive mood, groups with a maverick outperformed groups having several perspectives. (shrink)

The economic principle of communication, according to which successful communication can be reached by least effort, has been studied for verbal communication. With respect to nonverbal behavior, it implies that forms of iconic gestures change over the course of communication and become reduced in the sense of less pronounced. These changes and their effects on learning are currently unexplored in relevant literature. Addressing this research gap, we conducted a word learning study to test the effects of changing gestures on children’s (...) slow mapping. We applied a within-subject design and tested 51 children, aged 6.7 years, who learned unknown words from a story. The storyteller acted on the basis of two conditions: In one condition, in which half of the target words were presented, the story presentation was enhanced with progressively reduced iconic gestures ; in the other condition, half of the target words were accompanied by fully executed iconic gestures. To ensure a reliable gesture presentation, children were exposed to a recorded person telling a story in both conditions. We tested the slow mapping effects on children’s productive and receptive word knowledge three minutes as well as two to three days after being presented the story. The results suggest that children’s production of the target words, but not their understanding thereof, was enhanced by PRG. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Children learn and use various strategies to solve math problems. One way children's math learning can be supported is through their use of and exposure to hand gestures. Children's self-produced gestures can reveal unique, math-relevant knowledge that is not contained in their speech. Additionally, these gestures can assist with their math learning and problem solving by supporting their cognitive processes, such as executive function. The gestures that children observe during math instructions are also linked to supporting cognition. Specifically, children are (...) better able to learn, retain, and generalize knowledge about math when that information is presented within the gestures that accompany an instructor's speech. To date, no conceptual model provides an outline regarding how these gestures and the math environment are connected, nor how they may interact with children's underlying cognitive capacities such as their executive function. In this review, we propose a new model based on an integration of the information processing approach and theory of embodied cognition. We provide an in-depth review of the related literature and consider how prior research aligns with each link within the proposed model. Finally, we discuss the utility of the proposed model as it pertains to future research endeavors. (shrink)

When people talk, they gesture. Gesture is a fundamental component of language that contributes meaningful and unique information to a spoken message and reflects the speaker’s underlying knowledge and experiences. Theoretical perspectives of speech and gesture propose that they share a common conceptual origin and have a tightly integrated relationship, overlapping in time, meaning, and function to enrich the communicative context. We review a robust literature from the field of psychology documenting the benefits of gesture for communication for both speakers (...) and listeners, as well as its important cognitive functions for organizing spoken language, and facilitating problem-solving, learning, and memory. Despite this evidence, gesture has been relatively understudied in populations with neurogenic communication disorders. While few studies have examined the rehabilitative potential of gesture in these populations, others have ignored gesture entirely or even discouraged its use. We review the literature characterizing gesture production and its role in intervention for people with aphasia, as well as describe the much sparser literature on gesture in cognitive communication disorders including right hemisphere damage, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer’s disease. The neuroanatomical and behavioral profiles of these patient populations provide a unique opportunity to test theories of the relationship of speech and gesture and advance our understanding of their neural correlates. This review highlights several gaps in the field of communication disorders which may serve as a bridge for applying the psychological literature of gesture to the study of language disorders. Such future work would benefit from considering theoretical perspectives of gesture and using more rigorous and quantitative empirical methods in its approaches. We discuss implications for leveraging gesture to explore its untapped potential in understanding and rehabilitating neurogenic communication disorders. (shrink)

We investigated how two cues to contrast—beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting—affect comprehenders' cognitive load during processing of spoken referring expressions. In two visual‐world experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity, or fit, with the local (sentence‐level) referential context in critical referring expressions while comprehenders' task‐evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) were examined. In Experiment 1, beat gesture and contrastive accenting always matched the referential context of filler referring expressions and were therefore relatively felicitous on the global (...) (experiment) level, whereas in Experiment 2, beat gesture and contrastive accenting never fit the referential context of filler referring expressions and were therefore infelicitous on the global level. The results revealed that both beat gesture and contrastive accenting increased comprehenders' cognitive load. For beat gesture, this increase in cognitive load was driven by both local and global infelicity. For contrastive accenting, this increase in cognitive load was unaffected when cues were globally felicitous but exacerbated when cues were globally infelicitous. Together, these results suggest that comprehenders' cognitive resources are taxed by processing infelicitous use of beat gesture and contrastive accenting to convey contrast on both the local and global levels. (shrink)

Speakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way and whether they use space in a contrastive way when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ overall (...) tendency to use the same hand = 13.12, p =.001, 95% CI [.31,.43], d = 2.53) and same location = 7.47, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: = 4.19, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables. (shrink)

Co-speech gestures are closely connected to speech, but little attention has been paid to the associations between gesture and L2 speech performance. This study explored the associations between four types of co-speech gestures and the meaning, form, and discourse dimensions of L2 speech performance. Gesture and speech data were collected by asking 61 lower-intermediate English learners whose first language is Chinese to retell a cartoon clip. Results showed that all the four types of co-speech gestures had positive associations with meaning (...) and discourse L2 speech measures but no association with form-related speech measures, except the positive association between metaphorics and the percentage of error-free clauses. The findings suggest that co-speech gestures may have a tighter connection with meaning construction in producing L2 speech. (shrink)

Engaging in regular physical activity can have substantial cognitive and academic benefits for children, and is generally promoted for its beneficial effects on children’s physical and mental health. Although embodied cognition research has convincingly shown the integral relationship of the human body and mind, in schools physical activity and cognitive activity are typically treated as unrelated processes. Consequently, most physical activities used are neither sufficiently relevant for nor fully integrated into the learning tasks. In reviewing the literature regarding the integration (...) of physical activity into education to promote cognition and learning, two main lines of research emerged: exercise and cognition research vs. embodied cognition research. In this narrative review, we describe these two separately evolved schools of thought, highlighting their differences and commonalities. In categorising the existing studies on a 2 × 2 matrix, concerning the two main categories of relevance for and integration into the learning task, it becomes clear where the different foci lie, and how both lines of research could profit from learning from each other. Finally, a new instructional model that integrates task-relevant physical activities into the cognitive/learning task is proposed to inform both further research and educational practice. (shrink)