How Can the Science Behind Hand Gestures Help Shape Our Thoughts?

Why Do Hand Gestures Improve Learning and Nonverbal Communication?

Discover the surprising science behind how hand gestures shape our thoughts, reveal hidden emotions, and improve learning with insights from Susan Goldin-Meadow.

Ready to unlock the secret language of hand gestures and enhance your communication skills? Read the full article to discover Susan Goldin-Meadow’s fascinating research and learn how moving your hands can literally change your mind!

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All people use gestures to communicate their thoughts and feelings. A deaf, nonverbal child with no prior exposure to language communicates via gestures. But language speakers also gesticulate, using body language to supplement their words. Even people who were born blind and have never seen gestures, gesture. In fact, gestures reflect and shape people’s thoughts, especially those they are unwilling or unable to codify in speech. In her erudite treatise, developmental psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow reveals the subtlety and complexity, as well as the practical applications, of gesture.

Take-Aways

• Gesturing clarifies your communications and complements your speech.
• Reading other people’s gestures can expose some revealing tells that offer a glimpse into their minds.
• Gestures have the power to change minds.
• So long as humans exist, language will endure.
• Paying attention to your children’s gestures can reveal whether they are developing on schedule or experiencing a developmental delay.
• Gestures can aid medical diagnoses and treatments.
• Paying attention to students’ gestures can enhance their education.
• Traditional languages will always form the core of human communication, but gestures have an important role to play.

Summary

Gesturing clarifies your communications and complements your speech.

When people talk, they gesticulate. But how and why do people gesture? Gestures are physical movements. Some mimic physical actions — for example, if you were to describe how to tie a shoelace, you’d likely gesture with your hands, miming the movements involved. According to the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) theory, when you think or speak about doing an action, the part of your brain responsible for performing that action activates, and sometimes that simulation, or “embodied cognition,” results in a gesture. However, GSA theory fails to explain why people gesture to represent actions that the body does not perform, such as shapes, conceptual ideas, or the movement of objects.

“Gesture is a pervasive, although often overlooked, human behavior…Language, on its own, may not be capable of expressing the full range of human thought.”

So why do people gesture? The reasons are manifold. Complementing your speech with gestures helps you to convey your message more effectively. For example, imagine you are in a noisy bar. You might use exaggerated movements to communicate to someone out of earshot, such as, say, touching your lips with pinched fingers to indicate that you are hungry and want to order food.

Some studies suggest that gestures can even help you to speak clearly. They posit that rotating your clenched fist, for example, can prompt your brain to think of the word “screwdriver.” The research on this benefit of gesturing is still inconclusive. However, studies have proven that gestures can enrich your thinking. For example, when you gesture while describing an event, you’ll remember that event in more vivid detail than you would without gesturing. And yet another study found that gesturing while speaking can help reduce “cognitive load,” making it easier to remember details.

When someone gestures, the movement catches your eye and urges you to pay attention. Studies have found that schoolchildren pay closer attention when the teacher incorporates gestures into a lesson. Gesturing “brings a second modality into thinking” that shapes the way you communicate and learn. While speech represents information in a discrete, linear way, gesturing represents information in a fluid way. Verbal communication is a powerful tool for learning, but it has a much deeper, long-lasting impact when combined with visual communication, such as pictures or gestures. While pictures are static, gestures are dynamic; they “seamlessly integrate with speech.” Unlike pictures, you don’t need to think about how to pair them with speech. Your gestures are spontaneous and automatic.

Gestures are physical actions that involve the body in thinking and learning. They help to paint a vivid picture, compensating for the limitations of speech. Your language has specific ways of codifying information, but you may want to say or indicate more than your language permits you to communicate. In fact, gestures often attempt to fill the gaps in speech. For instance, you might say, “The cup is near the milk,” then use your hands to add precision to your vague words.

Reading other people’s gestures can expose some revealing tells that offer a glimpse into their minds.

In 1969, psychologists Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen classified five types of nonverbal behaviors:

1. “Facial expressions” — These gestures — for example, a raised eyebrow or a wrinkled nose — reveal your emotions.
2. “Regulators” — These subtle actions control the flow of a discussion. For instance, a nod of the head can encourage a person to keep talking.
3. “Self-adaptors” — These habits have a function, but the gestures have become automated to the extent that people continue to do them, even when the need is not present — for example, sliding your finger up the bridge of your nose to push your glasses up, even when you are not wearing them.
4. “Emblems” — These generic gestures may or may not accompany speech, such as a thumbs-up to signal satisfaction or approval or putting your index finger to your lips to indicate a desire for silence.
5. “Illustrators” — These gestures are closely connected to speech. For example, you might say, “You open it by twisting to the left” while making an appropriate rotating gesture.

“Gesture offers a privileged window into people’s minds. Gesture allows you to quite literally see the ideas that learners, both child and adult, are working on before those ideas appear in their speech.”

Gestures are so tightly knitted to speech that the language a speaker speaks shapes the accompanying gestures, and speakers of the same language gesture alike. Curiously, a blind Turkish speaker’s gestures mirror those of a sighted Turkish speaker, a blind English speaker’s gestures mirror those of a sighted English speaker, and so on. Gestures contribute to speech’s texture and rhythm.

What people say they believe isn’t always what they actually believe. For example, a person who might claim to believe that men and women are equally suited to leadership roles in governments and corporations might use dismissive gestures when speaking about women, exposing an unconscious bias. When the meanings that speech and gestures convey don’t align, that mismatch can be revelatory. By getting that person to demonstrate equality with his gestures, his beliefs might follow suit.

Gestures have the power to change minds.

Seeing other people gesticulate can change your mind. Researchers found that when children use gestures to communicate a concept that isn’t contained within their corresponding words, they are indicating a willingness to learn, change, and grow. Researchers Martha Alibali and Nicole McNeil studied the power of gesturing when instructing children. They found that children absorbed new information better when the children saw their teachers gesturing in ways that reinforced their lesson (for example, making gestures to indicate up and above while saying “up” and “above”) than if the teachers used conflicting gestures (making gestures to indicate down and below while saying “up” and “above”) or no gestures at all.

“Gestures — those you see and those you produce — can change your mind.”

Another study aimed to teach three groups of children how to solve a mathematical equivalence problem (for instance, 7 + 6 + 5 = ___ + 5) by exposing each group to a verbal lesson accompanied by either matching gestures, mismatched gestures, or no gestures. The study found that the children understood the concept best when the teacher accompanied speech with reinforcing gestures that differed from, but supported, the teacher’s verbal instructions (for example, using a pull-away gesture while pointing to the 5 to indicate that the correct answer is the sum of the other numbers without stating as such). The additional gesture proved to be a valuable teaching tool that enriched the teacher’s words and, thus, the students’ learning. However, when the teacher’s gestures were unclear — for example, pointing to the 7, 6, and 5 on one side, as well as the 5 on the other side, children were confused and added up all the numbers, deriving a wrong answer of 23. Thus, gesturing has the power to both promote and undermine learning.

Moreover, your own gestures directly influence the way you think. If a friend or colleague notices a mismatch between your words and your gestures, and adjusts their own gestures accordingly, that input can prompt you to change your thinking. Moreover, studies have found that encouraging children to gesture improves the way they understand math concepts and the way they reason, while encouraging toddlers to gesture helps them to broaden their vocabularies.

So long as humans exist, language will endure.

How would you communicate if you lacked an inherited language? Would you invent a new language? And what form would that language take? Before investigating, it’s important to consider whether language is the product of culture or of the mind. Languages pass down from one generation to the next by a process of “cultural transmission.” Yet every language shares common characteristics — basic elements and rules for combining them. This suggests that language reflects the way the human brain configures communication in general. So in the absence of inherited language, could humans reinvent language from scratch?

“If language disappeared, we humans would very likely reinvent it, and it would look (at deep levels) like the languages we speak now.”

This is not a whimsical question. In documented cases, deaf children from hearing parents spontaneously communicate with gestures called homesigns. Sign language in its various forms, though it differs substantively from spoken language, was formally created and structured in ways similar to spoken language. Studies reveal that deaf homesigners use combinations of gestures — pointing at food and their mother, suggesting they want food — in ways similar to how hearing children use combinations of words and gestures. Homesigners create sequences of gestures with the structure and function of sentences. Homesigners’ gestures mirror the structure and function of spoken human language.

Children create homesigns, and what they spontaneously create shares structures with the languages hearing children acquire. From early childhood, a powerful connection exists between people’s minds and hands. Hearing children begin by communicating with gestures and continue communicating with gestures long after they learn a spoken language.

Paying attention to your children’s gestures can reveal whether they are developing on schedule or experiencing a developmental delay.

Children don’t emerge from the womb speaking language. Hearing children, who don’t rely on a form of homesign for long, begin communicating through gestures between eight and twelve months of age. For instance, when children want to play with a toy they can’t reach, they furiously point to it in front of an adult. But tuning into your child’s gestures through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and beyond helps you to perceive their hidden thoughts that they themselves might not be aware of.

“Gesture often provides the first evidence that a child is ready to take the next developmental step.”

A child’s gestures reveal whether the child is developing on schedule or experiencing a developmental delay. When children are in the early stages of language learning, gestures extend their communicative range. Children who gesture a lot early on develop larger vocabularies, and early gesturing predicts later language skills. A child’s early gesturing indicates language development, so it’s important that parents pay attention to and respond to their gestures. When your child points to, say, a dog, reply with speech — “Yes, that’s a dog” — to promote learning. Moreover, encourage your children to gesture, which can unveil their unspoken thoughts and ideas. Finally, ensure you gesture when interacting with your child to help consolidate the idea that you are trying to communicate.

Gestures can aid medical diagnoses and treatments.

Gestures can prove a useful and effective technique in the diagnosis and treatment of mental and physical illness. For example, one study compared two groups of toddlers with brain injuries. Both groups’ members experienced similar language delays but differed sharply in gesture use: While the patients in the first group gestured in age-appropriate ways, the gestures of the patients in the second group were immature. When assessed a little over a year later, the patients who gestured at age-appropriate levels no longer exhibited any language delay, while the other group remained delayed. Doctors can use gestures as a diagnostic tool to identify brain injury victims who are likely to suffer from substantial language delay and those who are not, and they can intervene before the problem becomes untreatable.

“We need to watch what children with language delay do with their hands. Our question is whether gesture is characteristically different enough in different disorders to serve as a diagnostic.”

Autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder, presents difficulties with social interaction and communication. Autistic people often exhibit obsessively repetitive behaviors. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule identifies a general lack of gesturing — and pointing in particular — as a significant indicator for an autism diagnosis. Parents, teachers, and other medical personnel can identify a lack of pointing prior to language delays. By analyzing early childhood videos, researchers found that children who later developed autism gestured less frequently — and never pointed. Similarly, analyzing gestures can help doctors diagnose Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.

Paying attention to students’ gestures can enhance their education.

Teachers ought to pay attention to what their students do with their hands, because their gestures provide a unique perspective on what is going on in their minds and may indicate their preparedness to learn. Merely encouraging teachers to pay attention to gestures makes them better at reading gestures. However, teachers often lack opportunities to read gestures in class and may need to develop creative solutions, like inviting students to the board to solve a problem or doing one-on-one work at the students’ desks, to interpret their gestures.

“There are times when a teacher not only responds to a student’s gestures but even asks the student to make gestures more explicit.”

When adults watched a short instructional video on the three elements of hand gestures — “shape, motion, and placement of the hands” — their capacity to glean information from gestures improved. They picked up on an average of 50% more information from gestures than they recognized prior to taking the class. This suggests that trained teachers can decipher relevant information that students keep hidden in their hands. If a math student’s hands suggest, for example, that the student is struggling but won’t admit it, his or her teacher needs to be proactive and intervene. Teachers should encourage their students to gesture. The more the students gesture, the better they learn and the more information the teachers have to work with. Moreover, teachers should gesture mindfully in ways that reinforce their teaching.

Traditional languages will always form the core of human communication, but gestures have an important role to play.

Hand gestures can both echo and complement your language. They have the power to explain what’s on your mind and change your mind. Gestures let you express ideas, emotions, and actions that spoken languages can’t neatly express.

“We should elevate gesture so that it is recognized as central to language.”

Traditional languages will always form the core of human communication, and while an emphasis on gesturing won’t close the gap of human misunderstanding, “recognizing that our thoughts run through our hands as a vital, electric current is an important first step.”

About the Author

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the department of psychology, the department of human development, and the committee on education at the University of Chicago. She wrote Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought.