The Effects of the Gesture Viewpoint on the Students’ Memory of Words and Stories

Abstract

The goal of this work is to estimate the effects of teacher’s iconic gestures on the students’ memory of words and short stories. Indeed, some evidence seems to confirm the possibility that iconics help the listener, but it is unclear what are the elements that make gestures more or less useful. According to McNeill’s observation that children produce many more Character Viewpoint gestures than Observer Viewpoint ones, we hypothesize that they also understand and remember better words accompanied by these gestures. The results of two experimental studies showed that iconic gestures helped students to remember words and tales better and that younger students performed better in memory tasks when their teacher used Character Viewpoint gestures.KeywordsiconicCharacter Viewpointeffectsmemorystudents