The Mind Hidden in Our Hands

Our hands are always with us and are used for communication all over the world. When children do not have an established language model to learn from, they use their hands to gesture, and these gestures take on the forms of language. In this role, the hands reveal the fundamental properties of the mind that give shape to language. When children do learn an established language, they again use their hands to gesture. These gestures do not look like language but form an integrated system with language. In this role, the hands can convey ideas not found in the language they accompany. In both contexts, gesture provides a clear view of the mind hidden in our hands

Sex Differences in Language First Appear in Gesture

Children differ in how quickly they reach linguistic milestones. Boys typically produce their first multi-word sentences later than girls do. We ask here whether there are sex differences in children’s gestures that precede, and presage, these sex differences in speech. To explore this question, we observed 22 girls and 18 boys every 4 months as they progressed from one-word speech to multi-word speech. We found that boys not only produced speech + speech (S+S) combinations (‘drink juice’) 3 months later than girls, but they also produced gesture + speech (G+S) combinations expressing the same types of semantic relations (‘eat’ + point at cookie) 3 months later than girls. Because G+S combinations are produced earlier than S+S combinations, children’s gestures provide the first sign that boys are likely to lag behind girls in the onset of sentence constructions

Gestures can help children learn mathematics: How researchers can work with teachers to make gesture studies applicable to classrooms

The gestures we produce serve a variety of functions—they affect our communication, guide our attention and help us think and change the way we think. Gestures can consequently also help us learn, generalize what we learn and retain that knowledge over time. The effects of gesture-based instruction in mathematics have been well studied. However, few of these studies are directly applicable to classroom environments. Here, we review literature that highlights the benefits of producing and observing gestures when teaching and learning mathematics, and we provide suggestions for designing research studies with an eye towards how gestures can feasibly be applied to classroom learning. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence’.</p

When Gesture Is and Is Not Language

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Early gesture selectively predicts later language learning

The gestures children produce predict the early stages of spoken language development. Here we ask whether gesture is a global predictor of language learning, or whether particular gestures predict particular language outcomes. We observed 52 children interacting with their caregivers at home, and found that gesture use at 18 months selectively predicted lexical versus syntactic skills at 42 months, even with early child speech controlled. Specifically, number of different meanings conveyed in gesture at 18 months predicted vocabulary at 42 months, but number of gesture+speech combinations did not. In contrast, number of gesture + speech combinations, particularly those conveying sentence-like ideas, produced at 18 months predicted sentence complexity at 42 months, but meanings conveyed in gesture did not. We can thus predict particular milestones in vocabulary and sentence complexity at age 3 and a half by watching how children move their hands two years earlier

Gesturing with an Injured Brain: How Gesture Helps Children with Early Brain Injury Learn Linguistic Constructions

Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech ? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL – matched to thirty TD children on expressive vocabulary – in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture+speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types first in speech-alone. Overall, the gesture–speech system appears to be a robust feature of language learning for simple – but not complex – sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain

Do Iconic Gestures Pave the Way for Children’s Early Verbs?

Children produce a deictic gesture for a particular object (point at dog) approximately 3 months before they produce the verbal label for that object (“dog”; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gesture thus paves the way for children\u27s early nouns. We ask here whether the same pattern of gesture preceding and predicting speech holds for iconic gestures. In other words, do gestures that depict actions precede and predict early verbs? We observed spontaneous speech and gestures produced by 40 children (22 girls, 18 boys) from age 14 to 34 months. Children produced their first iconic gestures 6 months later than they produced their first verbs. Thus, unlike the onset of deictic gestures, the onset of iconic gestures conveying action meanings followed, rather than preceded, children\u27s first verbs. However, iconic gestures increased in frequency at the same time as verbs did and, at that time, began to convey meanings not yet expressed in speech. Our findings suggest that children can use gesture to expand their repertoire of action meanings, but only after they have begun to acquire the verb system underlying their language

Regularization of word order in the verb phrase differs from the noun phrase:Evidence from an online silent gesture perception paradigm

Prior work has shown a “natural” preference in the Verb Phrase for direct object Nouns to linearly precede the Verb. There is also evidence of a “natural” preference in the Noun Phrase to order Nouns before Adjectives. Given this, we asked how domain-general biases like regularization and language-specific biases like the preference for “natural” orders could jointly contribute to the emergence of these two common word orders cross-linguistically. Using a silent gesture paradigm (in which we presented iconic gestures without speech), we exposed different participants to competing Verb Phrase (NounVerb vs. VerbNoun) and Noun Phrase (NounAdj vs. AdjNoun) word orders at varying frequencies. In Noun Phrase contrast conditions, we found that regularization was greatest when the domain-general bias towards regularization and the linguistic bias to order Nouns before Adjectives were aligned. In Verb Phrase conditions, participants regularized to the same extent regardless of input: They opted for greater regularity, even at the expense of aligning with underlying word order biases. We discuss the implications of our work for understanding the effects of domain-general biases on language

Mapping hand to world; Development of iconic representation in gesture andhomesign

In both gesture and sign, objects and events can be represented by reproducing some of their features iconically.Iconic gestures do not typically appear until well into children’s second year of life, suggesting that the cognitive and/or com-municative resources required are not trivial. Here we investigate how manual iconicity develops in two different communica-tive systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in 52 hearing children learninga spoken language (co-speech gesture) to a deaf child creating a manual communication system (homesign). We focus on theshape of the hand, asking how handshape use changes between age 1 and 5, and how handshape choice relates to semanticcontent. We find broadly similar patterns of handshape development in co-speech gesture and homesign. This suggests that thecognitive building blocks underlying children’s ability to iconically map forms to meanings are shared across vastly differentcommunicative systems

Does Language About Similarity Play a Role in Fostering Similarity Comparison in Children?

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity comparisons, we observed four children who had not been exposed to usable linguistic input – deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. These children developed gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. Here we ask whether the deaf children used their gestures to comment on similarity relations and, if so, which types of relations they expressed. We found that all four deaf children were able to use their gestures to express similarity comparisons (point to cat + point to tiger) resembling those conveyed by 40 hearing children in early gesture + speech combinations (cat + point to tiger). However, the two groups diverged at later ages. Hearing children, after acquiring the word like, shifted from primarily expressing global similarity (as in cat/tiger) to primarily expressing single-property similarity (as in crayon is brown like my hair). In contrast, the deaf children, lacking an explicit term for similarity, continued to primarily express global similarity. The findings underscore the robustness of similarity comparisons in human communication, but also highlight the importance of conventional terms for comparison as likely contributors to routinely expressing more focused similarity relations