Foreign language education in the twenty-first century still teaches vocabulary mainly through reading and listening activities. This is due to the link between teaching practice and traditional philosophy of language, where language is considered to be an abstract phenomenon of the mind. However, a number of studies have shown that accompanying words or phrases of a foreign language with gestures leads to better memory results. In this paper, I review behavioral research on the positive effects of gestures on memory. Then (...) I move to the factors that have been addressed as contributing to the effect, and I embed the reviewed evidence in the theoretical framework of embodiment. Finally, I argue that gestures accompanying foreign language vocabulary learning create embodied representations of those words. I conclude by advocating the use of gestures in future language education as a learning tool that enhances the mind. (shrink)

There is plenty of evidence that speech and gesture form a tightly integrated system, as reflected in parallelisms in language production, comprehension, and development ( McNeill, 1992 ; Kendon, 2004 ). Yet, it is a common assumption that speakers use gestures to compensate for their expressive difficulties, a notion found in developmental studies of both first and second language acquisition, and in theoretical proposals concerning the gesture-speech relationship. If gestures are compensatory, they should mainly occur in disfluent stretches of speech. (...) However, the evidence is sparse and conflicting. This study extends previous studies and tests the putative compensatory role of gestures by comparing the gestural behavior in fluent vs. disfluent stretches of narratives by competent speakers in two languages (Dutch and Italian), and by language learners (children and adult L2 learners). The results reveal that (1) in all groups speakers overwhelmingly produce gestures during fluent speech and only rarely during disfluencies. However, L2 learners are significantly more likely to gesture in disfluency than the other groups; (2) in all groups gestures during disfluencies tend to be holds; (3) in all groups the rare gestures completed in disfluencies have both referential and pragmatic functions. Overall, the data strongly suggest that when speech stops, so does gesture. The findings constitute an important challenge to both gesture and language acquisition theories assuming a mainly (lexical) compensatory role for (referential) gestures. Instead, the results provide strong support for the notion that speech and gestures form an integrated system. (shrink)

Adults and children spontaneously produce gestures while they speak, and such gestures appear to support and expand on the information communicated by the verbal channel. Little research, however, has been carried out to examine the role played by gesture in the listener's representation of accumulating information. Do listeners attend to the gestures that accompany narrative speech? In what kinds of relationships between gesture and speech do listeners attend to the gestural channel? If listeners do attend to information received in gesture, (...) how is this information represented— is it 'tagged' as originating in the gestural channel? In this article research is described that addresses these questions. Results show that listeners do attend to information conveyed in gesture, when that information supplements or even contradicts the information conveyed by speech. And information received via gesture is available for retelling in speech. These results are taken to demonstrate that gesture is not taken by the listener to be epiphenomenal to the act of speaking, or a simple manual translation of speech. But they also suggest that the information conveyed in a discourse may be represented in a manner that is neither gesture nor language, although accessible to both channels. (shrink)

Many bilingual speakers believe they engage in different forms of thinking when they shift languages. This experience of entering different thought worlds can be explained with the hypothesis that languages induce different forms of `thinking-for-speaking'-- thinking generated, as Slobin (1987) says, because of the requirements of a linguistic code. "`Thinking for speaking' involves picking those characteristics that (a) fit some conceptualization of the event, and (b) are readily encodable in the language"[2] (p. 435). That languages differ in their thinking-for-speaking demands (...) is a version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposition that language influences thought and that different languages influence thought in different ways. (shrink)

During communication, we form assumptions about what our communication partners know and believe. Information that is mutually known between the discourse partners—their common ground—serves as a backdrop for successful communication. Here we present an introduction to the focus of this topic, which is the role of memory in common ground and language use. Two types of questions emerge as central to understanding the relationship between memory and common ground, specifically questions having to do with the representation of common ground in (...) memory, and the use of common ground during language processing. (shrink)

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a well‐studied (...) puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving. (shrink)

Examination of naturally occurring cases in which a person reports that a word is on the tip of his or her tongue has led several theorists to propose that an important role is played by blocking words whose intrusions hinder access to the correct targets. As yet, however, the blocking mechanism appears to have received little direct investigation experimentally. It was studied here by adapting the classic method of Brown and McNeill in which a person is presented with a definition (...) of a rare word and uses it to attempt to generate that target word. The adaptation that was made was to append a potential blocking word to the presentation of each definition. The potential blocking words were either phonologically related to the target or not, either semantically related to the target or not, and either rare or not. Only the first of these factors exerted a significant effect—more cases of tip of the tongue were experienced when the potential blocking word was phonologically related to the target than when it was not. This result suggests that the recall of a word on the basis of its meaning may proceed via an intermediate stage characterised by partial retrieval of its phonology. (shrink)

Prominent models of human long-term memory distinguish between memory systems on the basis of whether learning and retrieval occur consciously or unconsciously. Episodic memory formation requires the rapid encoding of associations between different aspects of an event which, according to these models, depends on the hippocampus and on consciousness. However, recent evidence indicates that the hippocampus mediates rapid associative learning with and without consciousness in humans and animals, for long-term and short-term retention. Consciousness seems to be a poor criterion for (...) differentiating between declarative (or explicit) and nondeclarative (or implicit) types of memory. A new model is therefore required in which memory systems are distinguished based on the processing operations involved rather than by consciousness. (shrink)