Lively gestures make for a brainy child

GESTICULATE LIKE an Italian if you want your children to do well in school. Parents who use lots of hand gestures when speaking to their toddlers help the children to develop a wider vocabulary, new research has shown.

The work by a team from the University of Chicago also helps explain why children from better- off families tend to do better at school than children from low- income families.

Lead researcher Prof Susan Goldin-Meadow filmed 50 families from a variety of economic backgrounds, watching the care givers and the children and how they interacted. Frequent hand gesturing in the adult tended to produce similar gestures in the children.

Adults, and so children, from better-off homes, however, were more likely to gesture than in less well-off homes. This could have a significant impact when the children reached school, Prof Goldin-Meadow found.

Children who convey more meanings with gestures at age 14 months exhibited a much larger vocabulary at age 54 months. Those gesturing less had less well-developed vocabularies, she said. These differences in gesturing were apparent from as young as 10 months.

“Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low- income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families,” Prof Goldin-Meadow indicated.

Her work did not attempt to explain how gestures might influence vocabulary, but the research team speculated that gestures might indirectly help word learning by eliciting a response from an attentive parent.

“For example, in response to her child’s pointing at the doll, mother might say, ‘yes, that’s a doll’, thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child’s attention,” the researchers said.

Better-off toddlers at 14 months conveyed on average 24 different meanings with gestures, but their less well-off neighbours used only on average 13.