title: The gestures ASL signers use tell us when they are ready to learn math.
abstract: The manual gestures that hearing children produce when explaining their answers to math problems predict whether they will profit from instruction in those problems. We ask here whether gesture plays a similar role in deaf children, whose primary communication system is in the manual modality. Forty ASL-signing deaf children explained their solutions to math problems and were then given instruction in those problems. Children who produced many gestures conveying different information from their signs (gesture-sign mismatches) were more likely to succeed after instruction than children who produced few, suggesting that mismatch can occur within-modality, and paving the way for using gesture-based teaching strategies with deaf learners.
authors.affiliation: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. sgm@uchicago.edu
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goldin-Meadow
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shield
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lenzen
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Herzig
authors.forename: Carol
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Padden
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003638:Deafness / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics / Q000193:education*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012813:Sign Language