I am a fan of Susan Goldin-Meadow. First off, she has a great name. Beyond that, she asks the most intriguing questions, writes clearly, and develops good research design. If that weren’t enough, her field specifically fascinates me: the confluence of gesture, language, cognition and learning. Fortunately, she’s produced a tremendous body of work.
This article, The Role of Gesture in Learning: Do Children Use Their Hands to Change Their Minds?, in the same issue of Journal of Cognition and Development as the previous post on ToM, looks at the role of gesture in teaching and learning. It doesn’t look at interpreting but after reading it think of this question: If gesture has such an important role in learning, what happens when the teaching is interpreter-mediated? Is there a change if an intepreter produces a rendition which is text without gesture?
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