Channel your inner Madonna and vogue for this one. Why? Because of Susanne Vogt and Christina Kauschke’s work on hand gestures. Working off of previous studies, they wanted to investigate the use of attention grabbing gestures (pointing with the index to prompt a child to listen) versus gestures that are reflective of word meanings for nouns and verbs (e.g., moving hands forward and back to show a sliding motion). In addition, they wanted to compare the extent of word learning with such gestures between children with SLI and typically developing children (those matched by age and those matched by linguistic ability). With two groups of 4.5 year-olds and a language-ability-matched group of 3-year-olds, the kiddos received three training sessions in which nouns and verbs were instructed with the two types of gestures.
And so…. they confirmed that meaningful gestures proved to be superior to attention grabbing gestures. A promising finding was that the performance of the SLI group wasn’t significantly different than the same-aged typical group when looking at the number and depth of words acquired under the meaningful gesture condition. However, a major difference was that the SLI group maximized the use of meaningful gestures more than the other groups. In other words, the typical group didn’t seem to benefit as much from the meaningful gestures as the SLI group did. As far as word classes, there wasn’t a major difference when looking at nous vs. verbs.
Why the heck is this important? Their findings suggest that the kids we see in therapy have the capability of expanding their semantic network in both quantity and quality and can greatly benefit when meaningful gestures are added into rich vocabulary instruction for both nouns and verbs. Your next step? Start thinking about adding gestures into semantic intervention to maximize the potential of your kiddos. The addition of gestures is also a great way to provide support when pushing into the classroom setting. But you know that single finger gesture? Save that one for your Mac Book’s spinning rainbow ball of doom – I hate that thing!
Resources:
The Brains: Susanne S. Vogt and Christina Kauschke
Full article: Vogt, S. V. & Kauschke. C., (2017). With some help from others’ hands: iconic gestures helps semantic learning in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 3213- 3225.
http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2661762&resultClick=3
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