A Canadian study involving French-speaking university students has found that repeating aloud, especially to another person, improves memory for words.
In the first experiment, 20 students read a series of words while wearing headphones that emitted white noise, in order to mask their own voices and eliminate auditory feedback. Four actions were compared:
A small 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. The German-speaking participants were given abstract and concrete nouns to learn over the course of a week. In the first experiment, the 21 subjects heard the words and their translations under one of three conditions:
This is just a preliminary study presented at a recent conference, so we can't give it too much weight, but the finding is consistent with what we know about working memory, and it is of some usefulness.
The study tested the ability of young-adult native English speakers to store spoken words in short-term memory. The English words were spoken either with a standard American accent or with a pronounced but still intelligible Korean accent. Every now and then, the listeners (all unfamiliar with a Korean accent) would be asked to recall the last three words they had heard.
A new study claims to provide ‘some of the strongest evidence yet’ for the benefits of gesturing to help students learn.
The study involved 184 children aged 7-10, of whom half were shown videos of an instructor teaching math problems using only speech, while the rest were shown videos of the instructor teaching the same problems using both speech and gestures. The problem involved mathematical equivalence (i.e., 4+5+7=__+7), which is known to be critical to later algebraic learning.
The relative ease with which children acquire language has produced much debate and theory, mirroring the similar quantity of debate and theory over how we evolved language. One theory of language evolution is that it began with gesture. A recent study looking at how deaf children learn sign language might perhaps be taken as partial support for this theory, and may also have wider implications for how children acquire language and how we can best support them.
I always like gesture studies. I think I’m probably right in saying that they started with language learning. Way back in 1980 it was shown that acting out action phrases meant they were remembered better than if the phrases had been only heard or read (the “enactment effect”). Enacted items, it turned out, “popped out” effortlessly in free recall tests — in other words, enactment had made the phrases highly accessible.
I always like studies about embodied cognition — that is, about how what we do physically affects how we think. Here are a couple of new ones.
A study of all three groups of birds with vocal learning abilities – songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds – has revealed that the brain structures for singing and learning to sing are embedded in areas controlling movement, and areas in charge of movement share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for vocal learning evolved out of the brain pathways used for motor control. Human brain structures for speech also lie adjacent to, and even within, areas that control movement. The findings may explain why humans talk with our hands and voice, and could open up new approaches to understanding speech disorders in humans. They are also consistent with the hypothesis that spoken language was preceded by gestural language, or communication based on movements. Support comes from another very recent study finding that mice engineered to have a mutation to the gene FOXP2 (known to cause problems with controlling the formation of words in humans) had trouble running on a treadmill.
Relatedly, a study of young children found that 5-year-olds do better on motor tasks when they talk to themselves out loud (either spontaneously or when told to do so by an adult) than when they are silent. The study also showed that children with behavioral problems (such as ADHD) tend to talk to themselves more often than children without signs of behavior problems. The findings suggest that teachers should be more tolerant of this kind of private speech.
Feenders, G., Liedvogel, M., Rivas, M., Zapka, M., Horita, H., Hara, E., … Jarvis, E. D. (2008). Molecular Mapping of Movement-Associated Areas in the Avian Brain: A Motor Theory for Vocal Learning Origin. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1768 - e1768. Retrieved from http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001768
Winsler, A., Manfra, L., & Diaz, R. M. (2007). "Should I let them talk?": Private speech and task performance among preschool children with and without behavior problems. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 22(2), 215-231. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W4B-4N08JHR-1/2/049d62f77f2fe3d1aa7588b8ddddd810
http://www.physorg.com/news124526627.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=song-learning-birds-shed
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/gmu-pkd032808.php
Research has already shown that children learn well when they explain things to their mother or a peer, but that could be because they’re getting feedback and help. Now a new study has asked 4- and 5-year-olds to explain their solution to a problem to their moms (with the mothers listening silently), to themselves or to simply repeat the answer out loud. Explaining to themselves or to their moms improved the children's ability to solve similar problems, and explaining the answer to their moms helped them solve more difficult problems — presumably because explaining to mom made a difference in the quality of the child's explanations.
Rittle-Johnson, B., Saylor, M., & Swygert, K. E. (2008). Learning from explaining: Does it matter if mom is listening? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 100(3), 215-224. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WJ9-4R5H25T-1/2/b7ea82e5c515b292fd8448a3b3c392ed
http://www.physorg.com/news120320713.html
Two studies of children in late third and early fourth grade, who made mistakes in solving math problems, have found that children told to move their hands when explaining how they’d solve a problem were four times as likely as kids given no instructions to manually express correct new ways to solve problems. Even though they didn’t give the right answer, their gestures revealed an implicit knowledge of mathematical ideas, and the second study showed that gesturing set them up to benefit from subsequent instruction. The findings extend previous research that body movement not only helps people to express things they may not be able to verbally articulate, but actually to think better.
Broaders, S. C., Cook, S. W., Mitchell, Z., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007). Making Children Gesture Brings Out Implicit Knowledge and Leads to Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(4), 539-550. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6X07-4R6JMY1-1/2/579ba864e9fea606cec11df85f21afa8
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-11/apa-ghg102907.php
A study in which 40 academics were asked to listen to a two and a half minute tape giving several names of people and places, and were told to write down only the names of people going to a party, has found that those who were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper at the same time, recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by those who were not asked to doodle. This supports the idea that a simple secondary task like doodling can be useful to stop your mind wandering when it’s doing something boring.
Andrade, J. 2009. What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology, Published online 27 February
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/w-dd022509.php
The ability of actors to remember large amounts of dialog verbatim is a marvel to most of us, and most of us assume they do by painful rote memorization. But two researchers have been studying the way actors learn for many years and have concluded that the secret of actors' memories is in the acting; an actor learning lines by focusing on the character’s motives and feelings — they get inside the character. To do this, they break a script down into a series of logically connected "beats" or intentions. The researchers call this process active experiencing, which uses "all physical, mental, and emotional channels to communicate the meaning of material to another person." This principle can be applied in other contexts. For example, students who imagined themselves explaining something to somebody else remembered more than those who tried to memorize the material by rote. Physical movement also helps — lines learned while doing something, such as walking across the stage, were remembered better than lines not accompanied with action. The principles have been found useful in improving memory in older adults: older adults who received a four-week course in acting showed significantly improved word-recall and problem-solving abilities compared to both a group that received a visual-arts course and a control group, and this improvement persisted four months afterward.
Noice, H., & Noice, T. (2006). What Studies of Actors and Acting Can Tell Us About Memory and Cognitive Functioning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(1), 14-18. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2006.00398.x
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-01/aps-bo012506.php
A recent study had participants watch someone narrating three cartoons. Sometimes the narrator used hand gestures and at other times they did not. The participants were then asked to recall the story. The study found that when the narrator used gestures as well as speech the participants were more likely to accurately remember what actually happened in the story rather than change it in some way.
The research was presented to the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Bournemouth on Thursday 13 March.
Why is it that people cannot keep their hands still when they talk? One reason may be that gesturing actually lightens cognitive load while a person is thinking of what to say. Adults and children were asked to remember a list of letters or words while explaining how they solved a math problem. Both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H., Kelly, S. D., & Wagner, S. (2001). Explaining math: gesturing lightens the load. Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society APS, 12(6), 516-522. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11760141
In the first of three experiments, 132 students were found to gesture more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems. In the second experiment, 22 students were encouraged to gesture, while 22 were given no such encouragement, and a further 22 were told to sit on their hands to prevent gesturing. Those encouraged to gesture solved more mental rotation problems.
In a recent study, volunteers were asked to solve a problem known as the Tower of Hanoi, a game in which you have to move stacked disks from one peg to another. Later, they were asked to explain how they did it (very difficult to do without using your hands.) The volunteers then played the game again. But for some of them, the weight of the disks had secretly reversed, so that the smallest disk was now the heaviest and needed two hands.