Using Your Hands May Help You to Grasp the Right Word

There’s an old story about two men who are strolling down the street on a bitter winter day, one chatting away while the other only nods silently. Finally, the man doing all the talking turns to his silent companion and asks him why he’s being so quiet. “I forgot my gloves,” the man says.

That’s a tale Robert M. Krauss says his grandfather first told him many years ago. “At the time, I did not see the point of the story,” writes Krauss in the most recent issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. “Half a century later, it has become a primary focus of my research.”

Krauss, a professor of psychology at Columbia University who studies hand gestures, summarizes the latest research on the subject in an article titled “Why Do We Gesture When We Speak?”

Although gesturing is virtually universal, researchers for decades have been struggling to parse the gist of gestures. Now, a spate of recent studies is offering some surprising new insights, Krauss and others say, including mounting evidence that humans do not gesture simply to communicate information to the listener. In fact, the primary purpose of certain gestures may be to aid the speaker.

“In the last decade or so, a lot of evidence has accumulated that if people do gesture to communicate they are wasting their time because they don’t convey a lot of information,” Krauss said.

One of the most recent studies to buttress that argument was conducted by Jana M. Iverson of Indiana University and Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago. The pair compared 12 children and adolescents who had been blind since birth with a dozen sighted children and adolescents while they responded to reasoning tasks specially designed to elicit gestures. The blind people, the researchers found, gestured essentially as often, and in virtually the same ways, as the sighted people. That strongly suggests that people do not learn hand gestures by watching and imitating other people.

“What we think that tells us at the very least is you don’t need to see gestures to gesture yourself,” Iverson said in an interview. Gestures, therefore, seem to be a natural accompaniment to speech.

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The question still remained: Do people gesture to provide visual information that augments what they are saying with their voices? So the pair conducted a follow-up study in which they asked four children who had been blind since birth to perform the same gesture-eliciting task. This time, however, the subjects were told they were talking to someone who was also blind. Nevertheless, the children gestured. “Thus, blind speakers do not seem to gesture solely to convey information to the listener,” the pair wrote in the Nov. 19 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

This doesn’t mean that gestures cannot convey information. They can. A lot of research has shown that people get information from watching people’s hands. And certain kinds of gestures, such as pointing while giving directions, obviously convey information.

“If you think of the sort of Harry Truman chopping gestures, that’s one kind of gesture. I suspect that they simply help us maintain the rhythm of speech,” Krauss said. “The other kind of gesture has a relationship to what’s being said. If someone says he went around the corner, the gesture that accompanies may have some formal relationship to turning a corner--you move your hand in a way that turns.”

But research suggests that at least some gestures have an additional purpose. No one really knows what that is. But Krauss argues that gestures help store information in the brain, perhaps by activating parts of the brain involved in movement. The gesture can also help retrieve that information by activating those parts of the brain again, he said.

“Gestures virtually always precede the word--they don’t follow it. Sometimes it’s as much as three seconds before. That is consistent with the idea that the gesture is trying to access the word,” Krauss said.

“It’s a very common occurrence that you’re speaking and you come to the point where you can’t remember the word you want. It’s just a word that eludes your grasp at that moment,” Krauss said. “The gesture helps retrieve the word.”

Gesturing does not, Krauss thinks, help retrieve words that describe abstract ideas, such as compassion. “But if you think of a word like ‘castanets,’ it may very well help. We think that there are these connections that go from the concept to the representation. If you say, ‘What do you call that Spanish instrument that women play?’ And if they can’t get the word, they will make this castanets-like motion with their hands. If you make the motion of the castanet, you can retrieve the word.”

Iverson said she is unsure about this theory, but preliminary data from another experiment she is conducting seems to support it.

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She and her colleagues are asking adults to watch Sylvester and Tweety cartoons and then recount the cartoon’s story to someone who hadn’t seen it. Some of the subjects retell the story while sitting on their hands; others have their hands free. The subjects then come back and recount the cartoon again a week later.

“It looks like the people who sat on their hands the first time do much worse remembering the cartoon after the week delay,” Iverson said. “They remember less information. They make a lot of mistakes. Some even invent things. And they take a really long time to do it. They hesitate a lot--there’s a lot of ‘ums.’ ”

This theory is supported by research showing that some stroke victims can sometimes help overcome certain memory problems by gesturing.

“I think in the brain there are really close connections between language and motor areas,” Iverson said.

“Gesturing certainly is talking with your hands in terms of conveying information,” said Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology. “But I would like to think it’s more than that. You could say it helps you think.”