University of Hertfordshire

When children, and adults, are asked to explain something they frequently gesture with their hands. These gestures are usually spontaneous and produced without conscious awareness. Research is being carried out in the School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, focusing on what children's gestures can tell us about their thoughts.

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Children's representations: Gesture and cognitive change

An ESRC grant awarded to Prof Karen Pine set out to explore these issues with the following aims and outcomes:

Aim 1: To establish a reliable and valid coding scheme for interpreting children's gestures on the balance beam task and to investigate whether children's gestures can indicate knowledge which they cannot express in words and when they are ready to learn.

A valid and reliable coding scheme was established and used to code the gestures of 145 children completing the balance beam task. Children whose gestures did not match their speech learned more than children whose gestures and speech matched. Additional microgenetic analyses of a further 21 children's gestures shed important light on the temporal and semantic relationship between gesture and speech. In short, gestures occur slightly BEFORE the word they convey and gestures can convey information that is DIFFERENT from the speech that accompanies them. Children also sometimes display MORE ADVANCED knowledge in their gestures than they do in their speech.

Aim 2: To compare the effects of allowing or prohibiting gestures on children's cognitive change.

We have been looking at what happens when children aren't allowed to gesture (by placing their hands inside mittens that 'stick' to the table). How will this affect their thinking, their language or even their learning ability?

An empirical study initially found that restricting the gestures of 103 typically developing children did not have a significant effect on children's improvement on the balance beam task. Additional testing was carried out with 45 children with Specific Language Impairment. Restricting the gestures of these children had a significant effect on their learning about the balance beam task. This is an important break-though in understanding the functional role of gestures since it showed that gestures facilitate conceptual change in children with language difficulties.

Outputs:

PINE, K. J., Lufkin, N., & Messer, D. J. (2004). More gestures than answers: Children learning about balance. Developmental Psychology, 40 (6) 1059-1067.
Download this paper

PINE, K. J., Lufkin, N. & Messer, D.J. (2003). Exploring the relationship between children's speech and gestures on a balance task. Paper presented at the XIth European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Milan, Italy, August 2003.

Future Projects:

We currently have another ESRC funded project looking at

The role of gestures in children's cognitive and linguistic processes