Gesture highlights perceptually present information for speakers
Martha W. Alibali | University of Wisconsin — Madison
Sotaro Kita | University of Birmingham
Why do speakers produce gestures? This study tests the hypothesis that gesture facilitates the conceptual planning of speaking, and in particular, gesture promotes thinking about perceptually present information. This view implies that, when gesture is prohibited, people should be less likely to speak about such information. We tested this prediction among children (N = 50) who solved and explained Piagetian conservation tasks. For one set of conservation tasks, all children were allowed to gesture. For a second set of tasks, some children were prohibited from gesturing by wearing a cloth muff. When children were prohibited from gesturing, they expressed more non-present information and less perceptually present information in their explanations than when allowed to gesture. Thus, gesture production appears to highlight or lend salience to perceptually present information. We argue that gesture helps speakers decide what to attend to and therefore what to say.
Published online: 11 October 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.10.1.02ali
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.10.1.02ali
Cited by
Cited by 31 other publications
Alibali, Martha W. & Mitchell J. Nathan
2012. Embodiment in Mathematics Teaching and Learning: Evidence From Learners' and Teachers' Gestures.
Journal of the Learning Sciences 21:2 ► pp. 247 ff. 
Alibali, Martha W., Robert C. Spencer, Lucy Knox & Sotaro Kita
2011. Spontaneous Gestures Influence Strategy Choices in Problem Solving.
Psychological Science 22:9 ► pp. 1138 ff.
Alibali, Martha W., Amelia Yeo, Autumn B. Hostetter & Sotaro Kita
2017.
In Why Gesture? [Gesture Studies, 7],
► pp. 15 ff.
Brooks, Neon B., David Barner, Michael Frank & Susan Goldin‐Meadow
2018. The Role of Gesture in Supporting Mental Representations: The Case of Mental Abacus Arithmetic.
Cognitive Science 42:2 ► pp. 554 ff.
Bucciarelli, Monica, Robert Mackiewicz, Sangeet S. Khemlani & Philip N. Johnson-Laird
2016. Children's creation of algorithms: simulations and gestures.
Journal of Cognitive Psychology 28:3 ► pp. 297 ff.
Clough, Sharice & Melissa C. Duff
2020. The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implications for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 14
Dunn, Timothy L. & Evan F. Risko
2016. Toward a Metacognitive Account of Cognitive Offloading.
Cognitive Science 40:5 ► pp. 1080 ff.
Gaudreau, Caroline M., Florencia K. Anggoro & Benjamin D. Jee
2020. Children’s Spontaneous Gestures Reflect Verbal Understanding of the Day/Night Cycle.
Frontiers in Psychology 11
Goldin-Meadow, Susan & Martha Wagner Alibali
2013. Gesture's Role in Speaking, Learning, and Creating Language.
Annual Review of Psychology 64:1 ► pp. 257 ff.
Gordon, Raychel & Geetha B. Ramani
2021. Integrating Embodied Cognition and Information Processing: A Combined Model of the Role of Gesture in Children's Mathematical Environments.
Frontiers in Psychology 12
Hilliard, Caitlin, Elizabeth O’Neal, Jodie Plumert & Susan Wagner Cook
2015. Mothers modulate their gesture independently of their speech.
Cognition 140 ► pp. 89 ff.
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Martha W. Alibali
2019. Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26:3 ► pp. 721 ff.
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Rebecca Boncoddo
2017.
In Why Gesture? [Gesture Studies, 7],
► pp. 155 ff.
Kim, Yanghee & Michael Tscholl
2021. Young children’s embodied interactions with a social robot.
Educational Technology Research and Development 69:4 ► pp. 2059 ff.
Kirk, Elizabeth & Carine Lewis
2017. Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking.
Psychological Science 28:2 ► pp. 225 ff.
Lozada, Mariana & Natalia Carro
2016. Embodied Action Improves Cognition in Children: Evidence from a Study Based on Piagetian Conservation Tasks.
Frontiers in Psychology 7
Mavilidi, Myrto Foteini, Margina Ruiter, Mirko Schmidt, Anthony D. Okely, Sofie Loyens, Paul Chandler & Fred Paas
2018. A Narrative Review of School-Based Physical Activity for Enhancing Cognition and Learning: The Importance of Relevancy and Integration.
Frontiers in Psychology 9
Müller, Cornelia & Tag, Susanne
2010. The Dynamics of Metaphor: Foregrounding and Activating Metaphoricity in Conversational Interaction.
Cognitive Semiotics 10:6 ► pp. 85 ff.
Nathan, Mitchell J. & Chelsea V.J. Martinez
2015. Gesture as model enactment: the role of gesture in mental model construction and inference making when learning from text.
Learning: Research and Practice 1:1 ► pp. 4 ff.
Pier, Elizabeth L., Candace Walkington, Virginia Clinton, Rebecca Boncoddo, Caroline Williams-Pierce, Martha W. Alibali & Mitchell J. Nathan
2019. Embodied truths: How dynamic gestures and speech contribute to mathematical proof practices.
Contemporary Educational Psychology 58 ► pp. 44 ff.
Richmond, Lauren L. & Jeffrey M. Zacks
2017. Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21:12 ► pp. 962 ff.
Son, Ji Y., Priscilla Ramos, Melissa DeWolf, William Loftus & James W. Stigler
2018. Exploring the practicing-connections hypothesis: using gesture to support coordination of ideas in understanding a complex statistical concept.
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 3:1
Stec, Kashmiri
2014. Reporting practices in multimodal viewpoint research.
Gesture 14:2 ► pp. 225 ff.
Tarantini, Angela Tiziana
2021.
In Theatre Translation,
► pp. 185 ff.
Vilà‐Giménez, Ingrid & Pilar Prieto
2020. Encouraging kids to beat: Children's beat gesture production boosts their narrative performance.
Developmental Science 23:6
Walkington, Candace, Dawn Woods, Mitchell J. Nathan, Geoffrey Chelule & Min Wang
2019. Does restricting hand gestures impair mathematical reasoning?.
Learning and Instruction 64 ► pp. 101225 ff.
Wanphet, Phalangchok & Jalila Sfaxi
2019. Exploring bilingual children’s integration of gestures into talk-in-interaction.
Language and Dialogue 9:3 ► pp. 349 ff.
Werner, K. & M. Raab
2013. Moving to Solution.
Experimental Psychology 60:6 ► pp. 403 ff.
Werner, K. & M. Raab
2014. Moving your Eyes to Solution: Effects of Movements on the Perception of a Problem-Solving Task.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 67:8 ► pp. 1571 ff.
Yu, Yanning & David H. Uttal
2021. Gestures, embodiment, and learning the rate of change.
Mathematical Thinking and Learning ► pp. 1 ff.
Zhang, Icy (Yunyi), Karen B. Givvin, Jeffrey M. Sipple, Ji Y. Son & James W. Stigler
2021. Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video.
Cognitive Science 45:2
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.