The Role of Gesture in Learning: Do Children Use Their Hands to Change Their Minds?

Abstract

Adding gesture to spoken instructions makes those instructions more effective. The question we ask here is why. A group of 49 third and fourth grade children were given instruction in mathematical equivalence with gesture or without it. Children given in- struction that included a correct problem-solving strategy in gesture were signifi- cantly more likely to produce that strategy in their own gestures during the same in- struction period than children not exposed to the strategy in gesture. Those children were then significantly more likely to succeed on a posttest than children who did not produce the strategy in gesture. Gesture during instruction encourages children to produce gestures of their own, which, in turn, leads to learning. Children may be able to use their hands to change their minds.

Full text

The Role of Gesture in Learning:
Do Children Use Their Hands to Change Their Minds?
Susan M. Wagner & Susan Goldin-Meadow
University of Chicago
April 2004
Address for correspondence
Susan M. Wagner
Department of Psychology
University of Chicago
5848 S. University Ave.
Chicago IL 60637
swagner@uchicago.edu
Tel. 773.702.1562
Fax. 773.702.0886
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to Susan Goldin-
Meadow. We thank Stella Felix Lourenco for her help with conceptualizing the study
design, and Valerie Ellois and Danielle Parisi for their assistance with data collection and
coding. We are most grateful to the principals, teachers and children who made this
research possible.

Children's Gesture and Learning
2
ABSTRACT
Adding gesture to instruction makes that instruction more effective. The question
we ask here is why. Forty-nine 3rd and 4th grade children were given instruction in
mathematical equivalence with gesture or without it. Children given instruction
illustrating a correct problem-solving strategy in gesture were significantly more likely to
produce that strategy in their own gestures during the instruction period than children not
exposed to the strategy in gesture. Those children were then significantly more likely to
succeed on the posttest than children who did not produce the strategy in gesture.
Gesture in instruction encourages children to produce gestures of their own which, in
turn, may lead to learning. Children may be able to use their hands to change their
minds.

Children's Gesture and Learning
3
Gesture is often used in teaching contexts (Flevares & Perry, 2001; Goldin-
Meadow, Kim, & Singer, 1999; Neill, 1991) and, when it is, it promotes learning.
Children are more likely to profit from instruction when that instruction includes gesture
than when it does not (Church, Ayman-Nolley, & Estrade, 2004; Perry, Berch, &
Singleton, 1995; Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2004; Valenzeno, Alibali, & Klatzky, 2003).
Why might gesture in instruction lead to learning? Multimodal presentation is, in general,
associated with learning (Mayer & Moreno, 1998). Moreover, listeners are often better
able to grasp a speaker’s message when that message is conveyed in gesture and speech
than when it is conveyed in speech alone (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1999; Goldin-Meadow
& Singer, 2003; Kelly, Barr, Church, & Lynch, 1999; Thompson & Massaro, 1986,
1994). Thus, the gestures teachers produce in instruction could help children understand
the words that accompany those gestures and, in this way, facilitate learning.
But the gestures teachers produce in instruction could also have an impact on
learning by encouraging children to produce gestures of their own. People have been
shown to mimic certain nonverbal behaviors that their conversational partners produce;
for example, they imitate their partner’s facial expressions or idiosyncratic motor
behaviors (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Perhaps people mimic their partner’s gestures as
well. If so, children may produce gestures of their own when they see their teachers
gesture. In turn, producing one’s own gestures could lead to learning.
Producing gesture has, in fact, been found to be associated with learning. For
example, children who are at a transitional point in acquiring a task frequently produce
gestures that convey information not found anywhere in their speech (Church & Goldin-
Meadow, 1986; Goldin-Meadow, Alibali & Church, 1993; Perry, Church & Goldin-
Meadow, 1988; Pine, Lufkin & Messer, 2004). As another example, children produce
more substantive gestures when they are asked to reason about objects than when asked
to merely describe those objects, that is, when they are asked to think more deeply about
a task (Alibali, Kita, & Young, 2000). Finally, children who express their budding
knowledge in gesture as they learn a task are more likely to retain their new knowledge
than children who do not use gesture in this way (Alibali & Goldin-Meadow, 1993).
Our first goal is to determine whether having teachers gesture while instructing
children increases the likelihood that the children will produce gestures of their own
during that instruction. We will find that it does. Our second goal then is to determine
whether the children who produce gestures of their own during instruction learn the task
more readily than the children who do not produce gestures.
METHOD
Participants
Forty-nine late third grade and early fourth grade children participated in the
study. An additional 19 children took the pretest but were successful on some of the
pretest problems and thus were eliminated from the study. Children were recruited
through public and private elementary schools in the Chicago area.

Children's Gesture and Learning
4
Procedure
Pretest. Children solved a pencil and paper pretest consisting of 6 mathematical
equivalence problems with equivalent addends (4 + 6 + 3 = 4 + __) and 6 mathematical
equivalence problems without equivalent addends (7 + 3 + 4 = 5 + __). None of the
children solved any of the pretest problems correctly. After children completed the
pretest, they explained their solutions to the 6 problems with equivalent addends to an
experimenter at a whiteboard.
Instruction. A second experimenter, the instructor, then conducted training
individually with each child at the whiteboard. The instructor showed the child how to
solve six mathematical equivalence problems. After each problem, the child was given a
different problem to solve and explain. The children thus solved six problems on their
own during the instruction period. The instructor taught the equalizer strategy on all of
the problems – the notion that the two sides of an equation need to be considered
separately and must be equal to one another. For example, on the problem 4 + 6 + 3 = __
+ 3, the teacher put 10 in the blank and said, "I wanted to make one side equal to the
other side. See, 4 plus 6 plus 3 equals 13 and 10 plus 3 equals 13. That's why I put 10 in
the blank."
Instruction varied along two dimensions. First, we manipulated whether the
instructor’s explanations contained gesture. In the Speech alone condition, the instructor
clasped her hands at her waist while giving the equalizer explanation in speech. In the
Speech + Gesture condition, the instructor swept her left hand under the left side of the
equation when she said “one side,” and then swept her right hand under the right side of
the equation when she said “the other side.” Second, we manipulated the children’s
attention to gesture and also their attention to speech. In the Copy-Gesture condition,
children were encouraged to copy the instructor’s gestures when they produced their own
explanations: "During your explanation, try to move your hands the way I did." In the
Copy-Speech condition, children were encouraged to copy the instructor’s words:
"During your explanation, try to say something like what I said." Children were
reminded of these instructions on each problem. A control group of children was given
instruction in mathematical equivalence but was not encouraged to copy the instructor.
This design resulted in five instructional conditions: (1) Speech alone, no copying
instructions; (2) Speech alone, child instructed to copy speech; (3) Speech + Gesture, no
copying instructions; (4) Speech + Gesture, child instructed to copy speech; (5) Speech +
Gesture, child instructed to copy gesture. Children were randomly assigned to one of the
five conditions prior to taking the pretest.
Posttest. Immediately after the instruction period, children completed a posttest
which was identical in form to the pretest, and was administered by the first
experimenter.
Coding
The speech and gesture that the children produced during the entire session were
transcribed and coded according to a previously developed system (Perry et al., 1988).
Speech and gesture were coded separately; speech was coded with the picture turned off,

Children's Gesture and Learning
5
and gesture was coded with the sound turned off. We counted the number of times each
child produced an equalizer strategy in speech or in gesture during the instruction period.
The children received credit for having produced an equalizer strategy even if they did
not copy the instructor’s speech or gesture exactly; 86% of the children’s equalizer
strategies in gesture were identical to the instructor’s, as were 46% of their equalizer
strategies in speech. When children varied from the instructor's spoken model, they
tended to state the equivalence of the two sides of the equation rather than go through the
addition steps. For example, for the 4 + 6 + 3 = __ + 3 a child might say, "This side is 13
and the other side is 13." When children varied from the instructor’s gesture model, they
tended to substitute points for the sweeping hands. For example, a child might point at
each number on the left side with the left hand, and then point at each number on the
right side with the right hand (rather than sweeping the left hand under the left side and
the right hand under the right side of the equation).
RESULTS
Does gesture in instruction encourage children to produce gestures of their own?
We begin by determining how many children produced the equalizer strategy in
gesture during the instruction period. We found that 18 of the 29 (62%) children who
were given a model for equalizer in gesture during training (i.e., children in the Speech +
Gesture condition) expressed the strategy in gesture during training, compared to only 4
of the 20 (20%) children who were not given a gestural model of equalizer (children in
the Speech alone condition), χ2(1)=8.64, p=.013. In addition to looking at individual
children, we also calculated the number of times each child produced the equalizer
strategy in gesture. Children in the Speech + Gesture condition produced more instances
of the equalizer strategy in gesture during training than children in the Speech alone
condition (2.1 vs. 0.4, F(1,47)=10.945, p=.002; see Figure 1). Importantly, children in
the Speech + Gesture condition and the Speech alone condition did not differ in how
much they gestured on the pretest – the proportion of children who gestured on the
pretest did not differ across the groups (70% vs. 86%, χ2(1)=1.91, ns), nor did their
number of explanations containing gesture (3.0 vs. 3.8, F(1,47)=1.54, ns); none of the
children in either group produced equalizer in gesture on the pretest.
Not surprisingly since children heard the equalizer strategy in speech in both
conditions, the two groups of children also did not differ in how often they produced
equalizer in speech during instruction: 27 of the 29 (93%) children in the Speech +
Gesture condition produced equalizer in speech, compared to 16 of the 20 (80%) children
in the Speech alone condition, (χ2(1)=1.89, ns). Moreover, children in both groups
produced approximately the same number of instances of the equalizer strategy in speech
(4.1 vs. 3.3, F(1,47)=1.90, ns, see Figure 1).
Thus, our attempts to manipulate children’s gesture by modeling gesture had the
desired effect – children who saw gesture produced gesture. In contrast, our efforts to
manipulate children’s gesture by asking them to gesture were not successful. Six of the 9
(67%) children who were given Speech + Gesture instruction and were asked to copy the
instructor’s gesture expressed equalizer in gesture, compared to 6 of the 10 (60%)
children in this condition who were asked to copy speech, and 6 of the 10 (60%) children
in the condition who were given no instruction to copy anything (χ2(2)=.12, ns).

Children's Gesture and Learning
6
Moreover, the number of times the children in the Speech + Gesture condition expressed
the equalizer strategy in gesture did not differ significantly across the 3 copying groups
(3.1, 1.7, 1.5; F(2,26)=1.59, ns).
Similarly, our requests for children to copy the instructor’s speech had no effect
(although this non-effect could reflect the fact that almost all of the children produced
equalizer in speech, i.e., there may have been a ceiling effect). In the Speech alone
condition, 9 of the 10 (90%) children asked to copy the instructor’s speech expressed
equalizer in speech, compared to 7 of the 10 (70%) children given no instruction to copy
speech (χ2(1)=.31, ns). In the Speech + Gesture condition, all 10 (100%) of the children
asked to copy the instructor’s speech expressed equalizer in speech, compared to 8 of the
9 (89%) children asked to copy gesture, and 9 of the 10 (90%) children given no
instruction to copy (χ2(2)=1.1, ns). Moreover, the number of times the children
expressed equalizer in speech did not differ significantly across the 5 groups (3.9, 2.7,
4.2, 4.7, 3.5; F(1,44)=1.25, ns).
Are children who gesture during instruction more likely to learn than children who do
not gesture?
Our next question was whether the children who expressed equalizer in gesture
during the instruction period were particularly likely to succeed on the posttest.
Collapsing the data across the five conditions, we divided children into three
groups: (1) 22 children who expressed the equalizer strategy in gesture during the
instruction period; all of these children also expressed the equalizer strategy in
speech. (2) 21 children who expressed the equalizer strategy in speech but not in
gesture during the instruction period. (3) 6 children who did not express the
equalizer strategy in either gesture or speech during the instruction period.
We then looked at how many children in each of these three groups succeeded on
the posttest. We measured success in two ways. First, we classified children as
succeeding on the posttest if they put the correct solution in the blank on 4 of the 6
problems. Using this criterion, we found that 19 of the 22 (86%) children who expressed
equalizer in gesture and speech were successful, compared to 8 of the 21 (38%) children
who expressed equalizer in only speech, and to none of the 6 children who did not
express equalizer at all (χ2(2)=18.51, p<.001). Second, we calculated the total number of
problems on the posttest that the children in each group answered correctly. Figure 2
presents the data. The children’s performance during instruction was significantly related
to their performance on the posttest (F(2,43)=13.71, p<.001). Children who expressed
equalizer in gesture and speech answered significantly more problems correctly than
children who expressed equalizer in speech alone (p=.004, Tukey’s HSD) who, in turn,
answered significantly more problems correctly than children who did not express
equalizer at all during instruction (p=.035). Moreover, children who expressed equalizer
in gesture and speech during instruction answered significantly more problems correctly
than children who never expressed equalizer during instruction (p<.001).
Importantly, we see this same pattern no matter what type of instruction the
children received. Table 1 presents the mean number of problems answered correctly by
children in each of the 5 conditions in the study; children are categorized according to the
modality in which they expressed the equalizer strategy during the instruction period.

Children's Gesture and Learning
7
Note that, in each of the conditions, children who produced equalizer in gesture and
speech during instruction answered more problems correctly than children who produced
equalizer in speech only during instruction who, in turn, answered more problems
correctly than children who did not produce equalizer at all during instruction.
Overall, children given instruction in Speech + Gesture tended to be more
successful on the posttest than children given instruction in Speech alone, but this
difference did not reach statistical significance for either measure of success: (1) 19 of
the 29 (65%) children given instruction in Speech + Gesture solved 4 of the 6 posttest
problems correctly, compared to 8 of the 20 (40%) children given instruction in Speech
alone (χ2(1)=3.12, p=.078). (2) Children given instruction in Speech + Gesture answered
3.7 problems on the posttest correctly, compared to 2.5 for children given instruction in
Speech alone (F(1,47)=2.27, ns). Thus, what really mattered in predicting learning was
not the instruction per se, but the effect that the instruction had on the children’s
performance during this period – in particular, whether the children produced the correct
problem-solving strategy in gesture as well as in speech during the instruction period.
The data suggest that producing a correct strategy in gesture has a positive effect
on learning above and beyond producing that same strategy in speech. To pursue this
hypothesis further, we correlated a child's posttest performance with the number of times
the child said and gestured the equalizer strategy. Posttest performance (the number of
problems answered correctly) was highly correlated with the number of times that
children both said (r =.34, p = .014) and gestured (r =.42, p<.01) the equalizer strategy.
However, saying and gesturing the equalizer strategy were also highly correlated (r
=.415, p <.01). We therefore conducted a partial correlation analysis to determine
whether the effects of speech and gesture were independent of one another. Controlling
for the number of times that the children gestured the equalizer strategy, the effect of
expressing equalizer in speech was no longer significant (r =.21, ns). In contrast,
controlling for the number of times that the children said the equalizer strategy, the effect
of expressing equalizer in gesture remained statistically significant (r =.33, p=.021).
Thus, the children's gesture behavior accounted for variability in learning that was not
accounted for by their speech behavior. The data provide support for the hypothesis that
children’s gestures contribute to learning independently of their words.
DISCUSSION
When given information in both gesture and speech, the children in our study
conveyed that information in their own gestures – and did so more often than when given
the information in speech alone. Indeed, children were more likely to gesture a correct
problem-solving strategy when they merely observed the teacher gesturing that strategy
than when they were explicitly asked to copy the teacher’s gestures. To our knowledge,
this is the first demonstration that gestures produced by one member of an interaction can
increase both the type and number of gestures produced by the other member. This
finding is consistent with studies reporting that individuals mimic other nonverbal
behaviors of their interlocutors (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
In turn, the gestures that the children produced during instruction seemed to have
an effect on their learning. Children who expressed a correct problem-solving strategy in
both gesture and speech were significantly more likely to answer the problem correctly
than children who expressed the correct strategy in speech alone, or than children who

Children's Gesture and Learning
8
did not express the strategy at all. Moreover, the gestures that the children produced
during instruction had an effect on learning above and beyond the effect that their words
had on learning. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that adding gesture to
instruction promotes learning, at least in part, because it encourages learners to produce
their own gestures.
Of course, it is possible that the children in our study who chose to gesture
equalizer during instruction were just those children who were particularly ready to learn
mathematical equivalence in the first place. If so, gesturing might have been reflecting
the child’s readiness to learn, rather than causing the learning. However, children in the
Speech + Gesture condition did not differ from children in the Speech alone condition in
the number of gestures they produced prior to instruction, suggesting that our
manipulation was instrumental in getting the children to gesture during instruction.
Moreover, the fact that only 4 of the children in the Speech alone condition produced the
equalizer strategy in gesture (compared to 18 of the children in the Speech + Gesture
condition) suggests that our manipulation shaped the kinds of gestures the children
produced during instruction. And it was the production of equalizer in gesture, not
gesturing overall, that predicted success on the posttest: 19 children gestured during
instruction but did not produce an equalizer strategy in gesture; only 8 (42%) of these
children succeeded on the posttest. In contrast, 19 of the 22 (86%) children who did
produce an equalizer strategy in gesture succeeded on the posttest (χ2(1)=8.88, p<.01.).
Thus, the gestures that the children saw during instruction influenced the types of
gestures that they themselves produced which, in turn, seemed to have an impact on
learning. These findings suggest that children’s gestures may be playing a causal role in
changing their knowledge.
There are several good reasons to believe that producing one’s own gestures
might contribute to learning. First, gesture production is associated with a reduction in
cognitive load: speakers expend less cognitive effort when gesturing while explaining a
math problem than when not gesturing (Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner,
2001; Wagner, Nusbaum, & Goldin-Meadow, in press). Gesturing while speaking thus
eases the burden of speech production, providing a learner with additional cognitive
resources that could be used to reflect on and store new representations.
Second, gesture production could directly change the on-line memory processes
involved in storing new representations. There is a robust finding in the memory
literature that performing an action enhances one's memory for that action – the subject-
performed task (SPT) effect (Cohen, 1981; Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1984). Recent
evidence suggests that sign language may engage the same mechanism. Hearing signers
remember action phrases that have been signed better than action phrases that have been
said, and the size of this effect is comparable to traditional SPT effects (von Essen &
Nilsson, 2003; Zimmer & Engelkamp, 2003). Gestures, as motor behaviors associated
with speech, might also engage this mechanism. In other words, gesturing while
speaking may create a more lasting representation in memory independent of, or in
conjunction with, reductions in cognitive load.
Finally, gesture production might encourage speakers to form imagistic
representations that can later be accessed. McNeill (1992) has argued that the act of
gesturing and speaking influences speakers’ on-line thought processes, and that gesturing,
in particular, induces imagistic processing. Producing gesture along with speech could

Children's Gesture and Learning
9
encourage children to form imagistic representations along with their verbal
representations. And children whose problem representations are supported by both
verbal and imagistic forms may be particularly likely to maintain those representations in
memory (Clark & Paivio, 1991).
Whatever the mechanism, it is clear that including gesture in instruction
encourages children to produce gestures of their own, and that producing one’s own
gestures is associated with learning. Children may thus be able to use their hands to
change their minds.

Children's Gesture and Learning
10
REFERENCES
Alibali, M. W., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1993). Gesture-speech mismatch and mechanisms
of learning: What the hands reveal about a child's state of mind. Cognitive
Psychology, 25, 468-523.
Alibali, M. W., Kita, S., & Young, A. J. (2000). Gesture and the process of speech
production: We think, therefore we gesture. Language & Cognitive Processes, 15,
593-613.
Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior
link and social interaction. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 76, 893-
910.
Church, R. B., Ayman-Nolley, S., & Estrade, J. (2004). The effects of gestural instruction
on bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education, in press.
Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1986). The mismatch between gesture and speech
as an index of transitional knowledge. Cognition, 23, 43-71.
Clark, J. M., & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual coding theory and education. Educational
Psychology Review, 3, 149-210.
Cohen, R. L. (1981). On the generality of some memory laws. Scandinavian Journal of
Psychology, 22, 267-281.
Engelkamp, J., & Zimmer, H. D. (1984). Motor programme information as a separable
memory unit. Psychological Research, 46, 283-299.
Flevares, L.M., & Perry, M. (2001). How many do you see? The use of nonspoken
representations in first-grade mathematics lessons. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 93, 330-345.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Alibali, M. W., & Church, R. B. (1993). Transitions in concept
acquisition: Using the hand to read the mind. Psychological Review, 100, 279-
297.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Kim, S., & Singer, M. (1999). What the teacher's hands tell the
student's mind about math. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 720-730.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H., Kelly, S. D., & Wagner, S. (2001). Explaining math:
Gesturing lightens the load. Psychological Science, 12, 516-522.
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Singer, M. A. (2003). From children’s hands to adults’ ears:
Gesture’s role in teaching and learning. Developmental Psychology, 39, 509-520.
Kelly, S. D., Barr, D. J., Church, R. B., & Lynch, K. (1999). Offering a hand to pragmatic
understanding: The role of speech and gesture in comprehension and memory.
Journal of Memory & Language, 40, 577-592.
Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (1998). A split-attention effect in multimedia learning:
Evidence for dual processing systems in working memory. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 90, 312-320.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Neill, S. (1991). Classroom nonverbal communication. London: Routledge.
Perry, M., Berch, D. B., & Singleton, J. L. (1995). Constructing Shared Understanding:
The Role of Nonverbal Input in Learning Contexts. Jounral of Contemporary
Legal Issues, Spring, 213-236.

Children's Gesture and Learning
11
Perry, M., Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1988). Transitional knowledge in the
acquisition of concepts. Cognitive Development, 3, 359-400.
Pine, K.J., Lufkin, N., & Messer, D. (2004). More gestures than answers: Children
learning about balance. Developmental Psychology, revision under review.
Singer, M.A., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2004). Children learn when their teacher’s gestures
differ from speech. Under review.
Thompson, L. A., & Massaro, D. W. (1986). Evaluation and integration of speech and
pointing gestures during referential understanding. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 42, 144-168.
Thompson, L. A., & Massaro, D. W. (1994). Children's integration of speech and
pointing gestures in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
57, 327-354.
Valenzeno, L., Alibali, M. W., & Klatzky, R. (2003). Teachers' gestures facilitate
students' learning: A lesson in symmetry. Contemporary Educational Psychology,
28, 187-204.
von Essen, J. D., & Nilsson, L.-G. (2003). Memory effects of motor activation in subject-
performed tasks and sign language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 445-449.
Wagner, S. M., Nusbaum, H., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (in press). Probing the Mental
Representation of Gesture: Is Handwaving Spatial? Journal of Memory &
Language.
Zimmer, H. D., & Engelkamp, J. (2003). Signing enhances memory like performing
actions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 450-454.

Children's Gesture and Learning
12
Table 1
Number Correct on Posttest as a Function of Experimental Condition and Child’s Production of Equalizer during Instruction a.
Children Classified Experimenter Modeled Experimenter Modeled
According to their Equalizer in Speech Equalizer in Speech and in Gesture
Production of Equalizer (EQ) No Instructions Instructions No Instructions Instructions Instructions
During Instruction to Copy to Copy Speech to Copy to Copy Speech to Copy Gesture
Never expressed EQ 0.00 (N=3) 0.00 (N=1) 0.00 (N=1) - (N=0) 0.00 (N=1)
Expressed EQ in Speech Only 3.60 (N=5) 2.43 (N=7) 2.33 (N=3) 1.50 (N=4) 2.50 (N=2)
Expressed EQ in Speech + Gesture 5.50 (N=2) 2.50 (N=2) 5.50 (N=6) 4.67 (N=6) 4.83 (N=6)
Total 2.90 (N=10) 2.20 (N=10) 4.00 (N=10) 3.40 (N=10) 3.78 (N=9)
a. The mean number of correct answers given on the posttest by children in each of the five conditions. Children are classified according to the
modality in which they expressed the equalizer strategy during the instruction period. Numbers in parentheses are the number of children who
contributed to each mean.

Children's Gesture and Learning
14
Speech in Instruction Speech+Gesture in Instruction
0
1
2
3
4
5
Expressed EQ in Gesture
Expressed EQ in Speech
Child's Behavior During Instruction
Instruction Given to Child
Mean Number of Instances of Equalizer Expressed by Child
Figure 1. Mean number of equalizer explanations children produced when given
instruction with gesture and without it. Children given instruction in speech and gesture
expressed significantly more equalizer strategies in gesture than children given
instruction in speech alone. There were no significant differences between the groups in
number of equalizer strategies expressed in speech. Error bars represent standard errors.

Children's Gesture and Learning
15
No EQ EQ in Speech EQ in Speech & Gesture
0
1
2
3
4
5
6Child's Behavior on Posttest
Child's Production of Equalizer During Instruction
Mean Number Correct on Posttest
Figure 2. Mean number of correct answers on the posttest. Children are categorized
according to the modality in which they produced the equalizer strategy during the
instruction period. Children who produced equalizer in gesture and speech produced
significantly more correct answers than children who produced equalizer only in speech
who, in turn, produced more correct answers than children who did not produce
equalizer at all. Error bars represent standard errors.