Major
Neuroscience
Anticipated Graduation Year
2021
Access Type
Restricted Access
Abstract
In two studies, we further explore potential differences in how childrens’ and adults’ understanding of a message is influenced by co-speech gesture, focusing on language background and proficiency. We suggest that bilinguals will benefit more from the use of co-speech gesture when processing a message in their lesser developed language, and that this effect will be pronounced among children due to a high difficulty of lexical retrieval. Additionally, we investigate whether the mechanism underlying this potential effect is allocation of visual attention. We find that while language influences what is remembered, language and gesture affect how the information is remembered.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield, Assistant Professor, Psychology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Influences of Age and Language Background on Co-Speech Gesture Processing
In two studies, we further explore potential differences in how childrens’ and adults’ understanding of a message is influenced by co-speech gesture, focusing on language background and proficiency. We suggest that bilinguals will benefit more from the use of co-speech gesture when processing a message in their lesser developed language, and that this effect will be pronounced among children due to a high difficulty of lexical retrieval. Additionally, we investigate whether the mechanism underlying this potential effect is allocation of visual attention. We find that while language influences what is remembered, language and gesture affect how the information is remembered.