Lending the brain a hand

Abstract

The goals of this dissertation were

(1) to investigate what gesture instructions (observation, imitation, or enactment) are most effective for improving verb learning in primary school children, and whether these gestures are equally effective for learning verbs from different verb categories and for children with different levels of language ability?

(2) to investigate whether the effectiveness of gestures in word learning is similar for children and adults.

(3) to explore whether learning and memorizing action words is influenced by seeing depictions of actions that mismatch the mental simulation that is automatically created when hearing the definition of an action word.

(4) try to explain where the potential effects of mental simulations on language processing stem from.