Researchers used headsets that release disruptive magnetic pulses to study how motor brain areas...
While the test subjects first heard the new vocabulary, the were simultaneously shown a video of a person making a gesture that matched the meaning of the word.
When these interfering signals were active, the subjects found it harder to recall the words accompanied by gestures.
The researchers concluded that the motor cortex contributed to the translation of the vocabulary learned with gestures.
"There's now quite a lot of literature showing that gestures play a role in learning. I think where this study takes it a step further is trying to understand why," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who studies the effects of gestures on learning but was not involved in the new study.
The effect did not occur when the test subjects were only presented with matching pictures instead of gestures when learning vocabulary.
In contrast, children-unlike adults-seem to benefit from pictures as much as gestures in the long run.
In an experiment published in 2020, the Leipzig research group had young adults and eight-year-old children listen to new vocabulary for five days, sometimes paired with matching pictures or videos of gestures.
After six months, the adults benefited more from the gestures than the pictures, while the children were helped equally by both.
Back in 1995, a study showed that such emblematic gestures facilitated French-language learning.
Even transferring the words to a new context worked better: When learners accompanied the new vocabulary with gestures, they were more likely to use the words in new sentences.