Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to widen the lens on language to include the manual modality. We look first at hearing children who are acquiring language from a spoken language model and find that even before they use speech to communicate, they use gesture. Moreover, those gestures precede, and predict, the acquisition of structures in speech. We look next at deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from using the oral modality, and whose hearing parents have not presented them with a language model in the manual modality. These children fall back on the manual modality to communicate and use gestures, which take on many of the forms and functions of natural language. These homemade gesture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of manual sign systems that are shared within deaf communities and are full-fledged languages. We end by widening the lens on sign language to include gesture and find that signers not only gesture, but they also use gesture in learning contexts just as speakers do. These findings suggest that what is key in gesture's ability to predict learning is its ability to add a second representational format to communication, rather than a second modality. Gesture can thus be language, assuming linguistic forms and functions, when other vehicles are not available; but when speech or sign is possible, gesture works along with language, providing an additional representational format that can promote learning.

Parents’ Translations of Child Gesture Facilitate Word Learning in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development

“…A child can convey a vast variety of items in gesture by extending an index finger towards the object—a task that might be cognitively less demanding than both remembering the verbal label for an object and articulating that label as a word. There is in fact considerable evidence (see Goldin-Meadow, 2011, 2014, for recent reviews) that suggests that children convey their emerging linguistic and cognitive abilities—from first words to first explanations of various cognitive tasks involving objects—initially in gesture before they can convey them exclusively in speech, using words. As such, gesture could serve as a unique communicative vehicle in sharing information about objects at the early stages of language learning, even for children with developmental disorders.…”

Early Gesture Provides a Helping Hand to Spoken Vocabulary Development for Children with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development

“…In addition to the effect of timely verbal input children receive from their parents to their gestures, another likely explanation—although not mutually-exclusive— is that the act of gesturing itself might also help children take the next step in language learning, largely by reducing cognitive load (Goldin-Meadow, 2014). Even though there is very little empirical work that has tested this possibility within the domain of language development, previous work that shows close temporal contingency between the achievement of different language milestones in gesture and in speech—from first words to first explanations (for reviews see Goldin-Meadow, 2014; Özçalışkan & Hodges, 2016)—supports its likelihood.…”

“…Even though there is very little empirical work that has tested this possibility within the domain of language development, previous work that shows close temporal contingency between the achievement of different language milestones in gesture and in speech—from first words to first explanations (for reviews see Goldin-Meadow, 2014; Özçalışkan & Hodges, 2016)—supports its likelihood. On the road to mastery of different language milestones in speech, gesture offers children a cognitively easier communicative tool to practice their burgeoning knowledge of different linguistic abilities.…”

Immersive VR and Education: Embodied Design Principles That Include Gesture and Hand Controls

“…As an example, when teachers gesture during instruction, students retain and generalize more of what they have been taught (Goldin-Meadow, 2014). Recently, Congdon et al (2017) showed that simultaneous presentation of speech and gesture in math instruction supports generalization and retention.…”