Garber P, Alibali M W, Goldin-Meadow S
National-Louis University, Department of Educational Psychology, IL 60201, USA.
Child Dev. 1998 Feb;69(1):75-84.
Children frequently gesture when they explain what they know, and their gestures sometimes convey different information than their speech does. In this study, we investigate whether children's gestures convey knowledge that the children themselves can recognize in another context. We asked fourth-grade children to explain their solutions to a set of math problems and identified the solution procedures each child conveyed only in gesture (and not in speech) during the explanations. We then examined whether those procedures could be accessed by the same child on a rating task that did not involve gesture at all. Children rated solutions derived from procedures they conveyed uniquely in gesture higher than solutions derived from procedures they did not convey at all. Thus, gesture is indeed a vehicle through which children express their knowledge. The knowledge children express uniquely in gesture is accessible on other tasks, and in this sense, is not tied to the hands.
孩子们在解释他们所知道的事情时经常会做手势，而且他们的手势有时传达的信息与他们的言语不同。在这项研究中，我们调查了儿童的手势是否传达了儿童自己在另一种情境中能够识别的知识。我们让四年级的学生解释他们对一组数学问题的解答，并确定每个孩子在解释过程中仅通过手势（而非言语）传达的解题步骤。然后，我们考察了在一个完全不涉及手势的评分任务中，同一个孩子是否能够运用那些步骤。孩子们对从他们仅通过手势传达的步骤得出的解答的评分，高于对从他们根本没有传达的步骤得出的解答的评分。因此，手势确实是孩子们表达知识的一种方式。孩子们仅通过手势独特表达的知识在其他任务中也能被运用，从这个意义上说，它并不与手相关联。
