A study using an artificial language adds to evidence that new vocabulary is learned more easily when the learner uses gestures.
“Vimmish”, the artificial language used in the study, follows similar phonetic rules to Italian. German-speaking participants were given abstract and concrete nouns to learn over the course of a week.
In the first experiment, the subjects heard the words and their translations under one of three conditions:
– with a video showing a symbolic gesture of the word’s meaning, which they imitated
– with a picture illustrating the word’s meaning, which they traced in the air
– with no gestures or pictures
After some time, the participants were tested while their brain activity was monitored. The test involved hearing the foreign word, then selecting the correct translation from four written options.
The researchers were interested in learning whether they could predict the learning condition from the brain activity patterns displayed when the participants were tested.
They found that the gesture condition and control could be distinguished in two brain regions: a visual area that processes motion, and the part responsible for memorizing new things.
Activity in these regions was also significantly correlated with performance. There even was a trend for this activity to correlate with performance.
Paper-and-pencil translation tests two and six months after learning showed that learning with gestures was significantly better than the other conditions.
A second experiment compared gesture and pictures in the more common picture scenario — participants only viewed the video or picture; there was no imitation.
Unsurprisingly, there was no motion involvement in this scenario: gesture and control conditions were distinguished only by activity in the biological motion part of the brain.
This time the picture condition led to better translation accuracy than the other two conditions.
The most significant result is this: when both experiments were evaluated together, the gesture benefit in experiment 1 (when the participant copied the gesture) was greater than the picture benefit in the second experiment.
The findings further demonstrate that foreign words are learned more easily when multiple senses are involved, which is what we recommend to keep in mind for all our language learners.
