GoKawiilNew study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.
New study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.
When adults teach children something new, words are only part of the story. A new cross-cultural study shows that adults from different cultures instinctively modify their gestures in similar ways to help children learn, suggesting that spontaneous human teaching may rely on a shared, deeply rooted communicative strategy.
Researchers found that although Italian adults used more gestures overall than Dutch adults, both groups increased the use of visually rich, two-handed gestures when demonstrating unfamiliar logic puzzles to children. The findings highlight how humans naturally adapt communication to support young learners, regardless of cultural background.
Teaching with the hands
Human communication is fundamentally multimodal, combining speech with gestures, facial expressions, gaze, and body movements. Among these, representational gestures (gestures that visually depict meaning) play a crucial role in teaching and explanation.
These gestures can show how an action works, illustrate the shape of an object, or recreate a movement in space. For example, someone explaining how to crack an egg might mime the action with their hands while speaking. The new study explored how adults use these gestures when teaching children compared to adults, and whether those strategies differ across cultures.
FIGURE 1. The figure shows an overview of the study design. After an initial introduction, the speaker interacts with the toys and then demonstrates their use to the two different audiences: an adult and a child.
... continue reading