Date created: 2021-03-24 02:09 PM | Last Updated: 2022-09-09 01:48 PM

Category: Project

Description: Previous research has shown a strong positive association between right-handed gesturing and language development. However, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear. Do children who produce more right-handed gestures learn words more efficiently and thus have larger vocabularies, or do children who have larger vocabularies produce more right-handed gestures? In the current study, we tested whether gesturing with the right hand enhances linguistic processing in the left hemisphere, which is contralateral to the right hand. We manipulated the gesture hand children used in pointing tasks to test whether it would affect their performance. In either a linguistic task (verb learning) or a non-linguistic control task (memory), 131 typically developing right-handed 3-year-olds were encouraged to use either their right hand or left hand to respond. While encouraging children to use a specific hand to indicate their responses had no effect on memory performance, encouraging children to use the right hand to respond, compared to the left hand, significantly improved their verb learning performance. This study is the first to show that manipulating the hand with which children are encouraged to gesture gives them a linguistic advantage. Language lateralisation in healthy right-handed children typically involves a dominant left hemisphere. Producing right-handed gestures may therefore lead to increased activation in the left hemisphere which may, in turn, facilitate forming and accessing lexical representations. It is important to note that this study manipulated gesture handedness among right-handers and does therefore not support the practice of encouraging children to become right-handed in manual activities.