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Biomedical subjects

S Goldin-Meadow

Publications and source records attributed to S Goldin-Meadow.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Explaining math: gesturing lightens the load.

Why is it that people cannot keep their hands still when they talk? One reason may be that gesturing actually lightens cognitive load while a person is thinking of what to say. We asked adults and children to remember a list of letters or words while explaining how they solved a math problem. Both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture. Gesturing appeared to save the speakers' cognitive resources on the explanation task, permitting the speakers to allocate more resources to the memory task. It is widely accepted that gesturing reflects a speaker's cognitive state, but our observations suggest that, by reducing cognitive load, gesturing may also play a role in shaping that state.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The cultural bounds of maternal accommodation: how Chinese and American mothers communicate with deaf and hearing children.

Children with special needs typically require family accommodation to those needs. We explore here the extent to which cultural forces shape the accommodations mothers make when communicating with young deaf children. Sixteen mother-child dyads (8 Chinese, 8 American) were videotaped at home. In each culture, 4 mothers interacted with their deaf children, and 4 interacted with their hearing children. None of the deaf children knew sign language, nor spoke at age level. We found that mothers adjusted their communicative behaviors to their deaf children, but in every case, those adjustments were calibrated to cultural norms. American mothers, for example, increased their use of gesture with deaf children but stopped far short of the Chinese range--despite the obvious potential benefits of gesturing to children who cannot hear. These findings provide the first cross-cultural demonstration that children are, first and foremost, inculcated into their cultures and, only within that framework, then treated as special cases.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1999

The role of gesture in communication and thinking.

People move their hands as they talk - they gesture. Gesturing is a robust phenomenon, found across cultures, ages, and tasks. Gesture is even found in individuals blind from birth. But what purpose, if any, does gesture serve? In this review, I begin by examining gesture when it stands on its own, substituting for speech and clearly serving a communicative function. When called upon to carry the full burden of communication, gesture assumes a language-like form, with structure at word and sentence levels. However, when produced along with speech, gesture assumes a different form - it becomes imagistic and analog. Despite its form, the gesture that accompanies speech also communicates. Trained coders can glean substantive information from gesture - information that is not always identical to that gleaned from speech. Gesture can thus serve as a research tool, shedding light on speakers' unspoken thoughts. The controversial question is whether gesture conveys information to listeners not trained to read them. Do spontaneous gestures communicate to ordinary listeners? Or might they be produced only for speakers themselves? I suggest these are not mutually exclusive functions - gesture serves as both a tool for communication for listeners, and a tool for thinking for speakers.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1999

What children contribute to language-learning.

There may be no greater testament to the resilience of language in humans than the observation that, when deprived of a language entirely, children will invent one nonetheless. Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited develop gesture systems to communicate with the hearing individuals around them. The children's gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at both sentence and word levels. Although the inclination to use gesture to communicate may be traceable to the fact that the deaf children's hearing parents (like all speakers) gesture as they talk, the deaf children themselves appear to be responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. In particular, the structural properties found in the deaf children's gesture systems cannot be traced to the gestures that their hearing parents use with them, nor can they be traced to the way in which the parents respond to the children's gestures.

Child↗
PubMed1998

Spontaneous sign systems created by deaf children in two cultures.

Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited nevertheless use gesture to communicate. These gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at the level both of sentence and of word. Although the inclination to use gesture may be traceable to the fact that the deaf children's hearing parents, like all speakers, gesture as they talk, the children themselves are responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. We have explored the robustness of this phenomenon by observing deaf children of hearing parents in two cultures, an American and a Chinese culture, that differ in their child-rearing practices and in the way gesture is used in relation to speech. The spontaneous sign systems developed in these cultures shared a number of structural similarities: patterned production and deletion of semantic elements in the surface structure of a sentence; patterned ordering of those elements within the sentence; and concatenation of propositions within a sentence. These striking similarities offer critical empirical input towards resolving the ongoing debate about the 'innateness' of language in human infants.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1998

The development of gesture and speech as an integrated system.

Children, even at the one-word stage of language development, spontaneously produce gestures along with their speech, just as adults do. Although there appears to be a brief period prior to the onset of two-word speech during which gesture and speech do not form a well-integrated system, the ability to coordinate gesture and speech to convey a single message--and to "read" others' gestures with their speech to comprehend a message--develops early and is maintained throughout life. Gesture-speech combinations deliver a coherent message to the listener despite the fact that they consist of two different modalities of expression. According to McNeill (1992; Chapter One), this coherence is possible because gesture and speech share a common cognitive representation; that is, before the communication unfolds, gesture and speech are part of a single idea. As expression proceeds the message is parsed, with most information channeled into speech but some information channeled into gesture. Speech conveys information in a segmented, combinatorial format, whereas gesture conveys information in a global, mimetic format (see Goldin-Meadow, McNeill, and Singleton, 1996). Thus gesture and speech need not, and in fact often do not, convey the same information within a single utterance. Because gesture and speech form a unified system, mismatches between them can be a source of insight into the cognitive state of the speaker. And, indeed, it turns out that in both the young, one-word speaker and the older child (and possibly adults as well; Perry and Elder, 1996), a difference--or mismatch--between the information conveyed in gesture and the information conveyed in speech can signal readiness for cognitive growth. Whether the actual production of gesture-speech mismatches contributes to cognitive growth is an open question. That is, does the act of expressing two different pieces of information across modalities but within a single communicative act improve a child's ability to transpose that knowledge to a new level and thus express those pieces of information within a single modality? More work is needed to investigate whether the act of producing gesture-speech mismatches itself facilitates transition. Even if it turns out that the production of gesture-speech mismatches has little role to play in facilitating cognitive change, mismatch remains a reliable marker of the speaker's potential for cognitive growth. As such, an understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech may prove useful in clinical settings. For example, there is some evidence that children with delayed onset of two-word speech fall naturally into two groups: children who eventually achieve two-word speech, albeit later than the norm (that is, late bloomers), and children who continue to have serious difficulties with spoken language and may never be able to combine words into a single string (Feldman, Holland, Kemp, and Janosky, 1992; Thal, Tobias, and Morrison, 1991). Observation of combinations in which gesture and speech convey different information may prove a useful clinical tool for distinguishing, at a relatively young age, children who will be late bloomers from those who will have great difficulty mastering spoken language without intervention (see Stare, 1996, for preliminary evidence that the relationship between gesture and speech in children with unilateral brain damage correlates with early versus late onset of two-word combinations. In sum, for both speakers and listeners, gesture and speech are two aspects of a single process, with each modality contributing its own unique level of representation. Gesture conveys information in the global, imagistic form for which it is well suited, and speech conveys information in the segmented, combinatorial fashion that characterizes linguistic structures. The total representation of any message is therefore a synthesis of the analog gestural mode and the discrete speech mode. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

Child Development↗
PubMed1998

Knowledge conveyed in gesture is not tied to the hands.

Children frequently gesture when they explain what they know, and their gestures sometimes convey different information than their speech does. In this study, we investigate whether children's gestures convey knowledge that the children themselves can recognize in another context. We asked fourth-grade children to explain their solutions to a set of math problems and identified the solution procedures each child conveyed only in gesture (and not in speech) during the explanations. We then examined whether those procedures could be accessed by the same child on a rating task that did not involve gesture at all. Children rated solutions derived from procedures they conveyed uniquely in gesture higher than solutions derived from procedures they did not convey at all. Thus, gesture is indeed a vehicle through which children express their knowledge. The knowledge children express uniquely in gesture is accessible on other tasks, and in this sense, is not tied to the hands.

Child↗
PubMed1997

What's communication got to do with it? Gesture in children blind from birth.

It is widely accepted that gesture can serve a communicative function. The purpose of this study was to explore gesture use in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen gesture and have no experience with its communicative function. Four children blind from birth were tested in 3 discourse situations (narrative, reasoning, and spatial directions) and compared with groups of sighted and blindfolded sighted children. Blind children produced gestures, although not in all of the contexts in which sighted children gestured, and the gestures they produced resembled those of sighted children in both form and content. Results suggest that gesture may serve a function for the speaker that is independent of its impact on the listener.

Blindness↗
PubMed1997

From here and now to there and then: the development of displaced reference in homesign and English.

An essential function of human language is the ability to refer to information that is spatially and temporally displaced from the location of the speaker and the listener, that is, displaced reference. This article describes the development of this function in 4 deaf children who were not exposed to a usable conventional language model and communicated via idiosyncratic gesture systems, called homesign, and in 18 hearing children who were acquiring English as a native language. Although the deaf children referred to the nonpresent much less frequently and at later ages than the hearing children, both groups followed a similar developmental path, adding increasingly abstract categories of displaced reference to their repertoires in the same sequence. Caregivers in both groups infrequently initiated displaced reference, except with respect to communication about past events. Despite the absence of a shared linguistic code, the deaf children succeeded in evoking the non-present by generating novel gestures, by modifying the context of conventional gestures, and by pragmatic means. The findings indicate that a conventional language model is not essential for children to be able to extend their communication beyond the here and now.

Child↗
PubMed1996

Silence is liberating: removing the handcuffs on grammatical expression in the manual modality.

Grammatical properties are found in conventional sign languages of the deaf and in unconventional gesture systems created by deaf children lacking language models. However, they do not arise in spontaneous gestures produced along with speech. The authors propose a model explaining when the manual modality will assume grammatical properties and when it will not. The model argues that two grammatical features, segmentation and hierarchical combination, appear in all settings in which one human communicates symbolically with another. These properties are preferentially assumed by speech whenever words are spoken, constraining the manual modality to a global form. However, when the manual modality must carry the full burden of communication, it is freed from the global form it assumes when integrated with speech--only to be constrained by the task of symbolic communication to take on the grammatical properties of segmentation and hierarchical combination.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The resilience of combinatorial structure at the word level: morphology in self-styled gesture systems.

Combinatorial structure at both word and sentence levels is widely recognized as an important feature of language--one that sets it apart from other forms of communication. The purpose of these studies is to determine whether deaf children who were not exposed to an accessible model of a conventional language would nevertheless incorporate word-level combinatorial structure into their self styled communication systems. In previous work, we demonstrated that, despite their lack of conventional linguistic input, deaf children in these circumstances developed spontaneous gesture systems that were structured at the level of the sentence, with regularities identifiable across gestures in a sentence, akin to syntactic structure. The present study was undertaken to determine whether these gesture systems were structured at a second level, the level of the word or gesture--that is, were there regularities within a gesture, akin to morphological structure? Further, if intra-gesture regularities were found, how wide was the range of variability in their expression? Finally, from where did these intra-gesture regularities come? Specifically, were they derived from the gestures the hearing mothers produced in their attempt to interact with their deaf children? We found that all of the deaf children produced gestures that could be characterized by paradigms of handshape and motion combinations that formed a comprehensive matrix for virtually all of the spontaneous gestures for each child. Moreover, the morphological systems that the children developed, although similar in many respects, were sufficiently different to suggest that the children had introduced relatively arbitrary distinctions into their systems. These differences could not be traced to the spontaneous gestures their hearing mothers produced, but seemed to be shaped by the early gestures that the children themselves created. These findings suggest that combinatorial structure at more than one level is so fundamental to human language that it can be reinvented by children who do not have access to a culturally shared linguistic system. Apparently, combinatorial structure of this sort is not maintained as a universal property of language solely by historical tradition, but also by its centrality to the structure and function of language.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1994

Nouns and verbs in a self-styled gesture system: what's in a name?

A distinction between nouns and verbs is not only universal to all natural languages but it also appears to be central to the structure and function of language. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a deaf child who was not exposed to a usable model of a conventional language would nevertheless incorporate into his self-styled communication system this apparently essential distinction. We found that the child initially maintained a distinction between nouns and verbs by using one set of gestures as nouns and a separate set as verbs. At age 3:3, the child began to use some of his gestures in both grammatical roles; however, he distinguished the two uses by altering the form of the gesture (akin to morphological marking) and its position in a gesture sentence (akin to syntactic marking). Such systematic marking was not found in the spontaneous gestures produced by the child's hearing mother who used gesture as an adjunct to speech rather than as a primary communication system. A distinction between nouns and verbs thus appears to be sufficiently fundamental to human language that it can be reinvented by a child who does not have access to a culturally shared linguistic system.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1993

Gesture-speech mismatch and mechanisms of learning: what the hands reveal about a child's state of mind.

Previous work has shown that, when asked to explain a concept they are acquiring, children often convey one procedure in speech and a different procedure in gesture. Such children, whom we label "discordant," have been shown to be in a transitional state in the sense that they are particularly receptive to instruction--indeed more receptive to instruction than "concordant" children, who convey the same procedure in speech and gesture. This study asks whether the discordant state is transitional, not only in the sense that it predicts receptivity to instruction, but also in the sense that it is both preceded and followed by a concordant state. To address this question, children were asked to solve and explain a series of problems instantiating the concept of mathematical equivalence. The relationship between gesture and speech in each explanation was monitored over the series. We found that the majority of children who learned to correctly solve equivalence problems did so by adhering to the hypothesized path: They first produced a single, incorrect procedure. They then entered a discordant state in which they produced different procedures--one in speech and another in gesture. Finally, they again produced a single procedure, but this time a correct one. These data support the notion that the transitional state is characterized by the concurrent activation of more than one procedure, and provide further evidence that gesture can be a powerful source of insight into the processes involved in cognitive development.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Transitions in learning: evidence for simultaneously activated strategies.

Children in transition with respect to a concept, when asked to explain that concept, often convey one strategy in speech and a different one in gesture. Are both strategies activated when that child solves problems instantiating the concept? While solving a math task, discordant children (who produced different strategies in gesture and speech on a pretest) and concordant children (who produced a single strategy) were given a word recall task. All of the children solved the math task incorrectly. However, if discordant children are activating two strategies to arrive at these incorrect solutions, they should expend more effort on this task than concordant children, and consequently have less capacity left over for word-recall and perform less well on it. This prediction was confirmed, suggesting that the transitional state is characterized by dual representations, both of which are activated when attempting to explain or solve a problem.

Attention↗
PubMed1993

Transitions in concept acquisition: using the hand to read the mind.

Thoughts conveyed through gesture often differ from thoughts conveyed through speech. In this article, a model of the sources and consequences of such gesture-speech mismatches and their role during transitional periods in the acquisition of concepts is proposed. The model makes 2 major claims: (a) The transitional state is the source of gesture-speech mismatch. In gesture-speech mismatch, 2 beliefs are simultaneously expressed on the same problem--one in gesture and another in speech. This simultaneous activation of multiple beliefs characterizes the transitional knowledge state and creates gesture-speech mismatch. (b) Gesture-speech mismatch signals to the social world that a child is in a transitional state and is ready to learn. The child's spontaneous gestures index the zone of proximal development, thus providing a mechanism by which adults can calibrate their input to that child's level of understanding.

Child↗
PubMed1992

Comprehension and production of gesture in combination with speech in one-word speakers.

This study explores the role that gesture plays in the earliest stages of language learning. We describe how one-word speakers use gesture in combination with speech in their spontaneous communications, and interpret gesture presented in combination with speech in an experimental situation. Forty one-word speakers (ages 1;2.22 to 2;4.6) were videotaped in a free-play session which provided data on the child's spontaneous gesture and speech production. The children were also given a comprehension task in which the presence and absence of gesture were systematically varied in relation to speech. We found that (1) all of the children spontaneously produced gestures in combination with speech, and (2) all of the children were able to understand gesture when it was presented in combination with speech, not only when the gesture was redundant with speech but also when the gesture substituted for speech. These data suggest that, even at this young age, gesture naturally forms an integrated system with speech in both production and comprehension.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed1990

The effects of learning two languages on levels of metalinguistic awareness.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a bilingual environment-the juxtaposition of two language systems learned simultaneously-enhances children's awareness of the language(s) they are learning to speak. The study explores the development of metalinguistic awareness at three different levels of explicit knowledge about language in monolingual children, and assesses the effects of a bilingual experience on this developmental process. To observe the development of metalinguistic awareness and to test the bilingual hypothesis, we compared metalinguistic skills in 32 Spanish-speaking and 32 English-speaking monolinguals and in 32 Spanish-English bilinguals aged 4:5 to 8:0. The Spanish and English metalinguistic tests each contained 15 different ungrammatical constructions (e.g., "Steven and Robert is a brother") and 15 grammatically correct "fillers." For each item, the children were asked in the appropriate language to note whether the construction was correct or incorrect, to correct the errors they noted, and to explain why those errors were wrong. We found that the monolingual children followed the same sequence in acquiring the ability to detect, to correct, and to explain grammatical errors; in particular, they progressed from a content-based orientation to a form-based orientation to language at each of the three levels. However, we noted different outcomes in terms of the types of grammatical constructions that were easy for monolinguals to master at each level-the constructions that were easy to detect and correct were distinct from those that were easy to explain. The bilingual experience was found to speed the transition from a content-based to a form-based approach to language at certain levels of awareness (detection and correction), but had less of an effect on explanations. Moreover, the bilingual experience did not appear to affect the types of grammatical constructions that were easy to master at any of the three levels. These data suggest that the experience of learning two languages hastens the development of certain metalinguistic skills in young children, but does not alter the course of that development. Thus, while learning two languages may enhance a speaker's "ear" for regularities of form, it does not appear to augment his grammatical "mind" for understanding those regularities.

Awareness↗