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Methodological issues in the assessment of gesture-speech mismatch: A rejoinder to perry, church, and goldin-meadow
Abstract
In a recent study (Stone, Webb, & Mahootian, 1991), we failed to replicate the findings of Goldin-Meadow and colleagues (Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow, 1988) regarding the value of gesture-speech mismatch as an index of transitional knowledge. In a response to our article, Perry, Church, and Goldin-Meadow (1992, this issue) point out three differences between their work and our own in the operational ization of the mismatch hypothesis and argue that the discrepant findings can be attributed to methodological artifacts. In the present article, we discuss these methodological points and present the results of additional analyses which still fail to replicate the original findings. Methodological and theoretical issues are raised concerning the generality and function of gesture-speech mismatch.
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48 6th and 8th graders were given 2 successive presentations of a standard Piagetian control-of-variables (COV) task. Between the 2 presentations, Ss in 4 conditions took part in an activity designed to elicit the COV strategy or to serve as a control. In a 2nd session, Ss were administered a different task requiring use of the COV strategy, a task requiring use of a different formal operations scheme (proportionality), and a measure of field independence. For older Ss, strategy use increased equally from the 1st to the 2nd presentation in all 4 conditions; for the younger Ss, strategy use increased only for 2 conditions containing a set of intervening probe questions. At both ages, "spontaneous" (i.e., 1st presentation) COV strategy users outperformed their "latent" (2nd presentation only) peers on all 3 Session 2 tasks. Latent strategy users outperformed strategy-absent Ss on the COV transfer task and on the proportionality task. Data clarify the distinction between spontaneous and latent levels of availability of a formal operations strategy. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A modified version of Inhelder's and Piaget's bending-rods task was used to isolate subjects with three different levels of access to the formal operational control-of-variables strategy. By administering the task twice in succession with minimal intervention between the two administrations, 28 subjects at each of ages 9, 11, and 13 years were categorized as spontaneous, latent, or nonusers of the strategy according to whether they used the strategy on the first, second, or neither administration, respectively. Through the use of additional rods measures and other related tasks, an attempt was made to characterize subjects at each level of strategy availability in terms of lower-level processes. The results supported the hypothesis that there is a large number of latent strategy users who would have been misclassified as nonformal operational by traditional procedures. In addition, an analysis of the secondary tasks indicated several important distinctions between non-strategy users and latent or spontaneous users in terms of both task-specific behaviors and theoretically related abilities. No differences in performance on the secondary tasks were found between the latent and spontaneous subjects. The results are used to argue for the potential utility of the notion of levels of availability in clarifying the nature of individual and developmental differences in the use of formal operational strategies.
The distinction between competence and performance models in psycholinguistics is used to analyze current theory and research strategies in the study of development. The analysis is used to argue for the construction of performance models of cognitive skills which do not reify the elements of competence models. Some suggestions are presented for a performance model which relies on Soviet notions of activity and interpsychological control. The potential theoretical and empirical benefits of the model are discussed in the context of the authors’ research on the deployment of formal operational skills.Copyright © 1980 S. Karger AG, Basel
This study investigates two implications of frequent mismatches between gesture and speech in a child's explanations of a concept: (1) Do gesture/speech mismatches reflect a basic inconsistency in the explanatory system which underlies a child's understanding of a concept? (2) Do gesture/speech mismatches, perhaps as a consequence of this inconsistency, reflect a heightened receptivity to instruction in that concept?The Piagetian conservation task, which asks children to explain their judgments about quantity invariance, was used to test these hypotheses. Children ages 5–8 were asked to make six conservation judgments and then to explain each of those judgments. All but one of the children were found to gesture spontaneously with their spoken explanations. Children were classified into two groups according to the relationship between gesture and speech in their explanations: “Discordant” children produced many explanations in which the information conveyed in speech did not match the information conveyed in gesture; “concordant” children produced few such mismatched explanations.Study 1 sought to determine whether discordant children were less consistent in the reasoning underlying their verbal explanations of quantity invariance than were concordant children. Two indices of consistency that were independent of the discordance classifications were devised and applied to the performances of 28 children on the six conservation tasks. The discordant children were found to have significantly lower scores on both indices of consistency than the concordant children. Thus, children who frequently produced mismatched information between gesture and speech in their explanations of a concept tended to display other forms of inconsistency with respect to the explanatory systems they used to justify their beliefs about that concept.Study 2 sought to determine whether this inconsistency reflected knowledge in transition as operationalized by heightened receptivity to training. After participating in a pretest of six conservation tasks, 52 children were exposed to training in conservation. Discordant children were found to show more improvement than concordant children on a posttest containing the same 6 conservation tasks. Thus, gesture/speech discordance appears to be both a useful marker of inconsistency in the explanatory system underlying understanding of a concept and of receptivity to training in that concept.RésuméCe travail étude deux implications ties discordances entre geste et parole que l'on observe souvent lorsqu'un enfant explique un concept: (1) Ces discordances reflètent-elles une incohérence du système explicatif qui sous-tend la compréhension du concept par l'enfant? (2) Ces discordances reflètent-elles peut-être en tant qu'effet de cette incoherence, une receptivité particulière de l'enfant à l'apprentissage de ce concept?Une tâche de conservation piagétienne, au cours de laquelle on demande aux enfants d'expliquer leurs jugements sur l'invariance ties quantités, a permis de tester ces deux possibilités. On a demandéà des enfants âgés de 5 à 8 ans d'effectuer 6 jugements de conservation et d'expliquer chacun de ces jugements. Tous les enfants sauf un faisaient spontanément des gestes pendant leurs explications orales. On classifia les enfants en deux groupes selon le rapport entre geste et parole qui apparaissait dans leurs explications: les enfants “discordants” produisaient souvent ties explications dans lesquelles l'information véhiculée par la parole ne correspondait pas à l'information véhiculée par les gestes; les enfants “concordants” produisaient rarement des explications de ce type.La première étude a cherchéà déterminer si le raisonnement qui sous-tend les explications verbales sur l'invariance des quantitds était moins cohérent chez les enfants discordants que chez les enfants concordants. Deux indicateurs de coherence, indépendants de la distinction entre enfants discordants et concordants, ont étéélaborés et appliqués aux performances de 28 enfants au cours de 6 tâches de conservation. Les enfants discordants avaient des résultats significativement moins bons que les enfants concordants pour les deux indicateurs de cohérence. Donc,les enfants qui produisaient souvent des discordances entre geste et parole dans leurs explications d'un concept exhibaient en général d'autres formes d'incohérence par rapport aux systèmes explicatifs qu'ils utilisaient pour justifier leurs croyances sur ce concept.La deuxième étude visait à déterminer si cette incohérence reflète des connaissances en transition rendues opérationnelles par une receptivité accrue à l'apprentissage. Après avoir été testés au préalable sur 6 tâches de conservation, 52 enfants ont été soumis à un entrainement sur la conservation. Un test ultérieur sur ces 6 mêmes tâches a montré que les enfants discordants faisaient plus de progrès que les enfants concordants. La discordance entre geste et parole semble donc être un indicateur utile à la fois de la cohérence du système explicatif qui sous-tend la compréhension d'un concept et de la réceptivitéà l'apprentissage du concept.
The purpose of the present study was to explore the proposed diagnostic role of gesture-speech mismatches as an index of transitional knowledge (Church & Golden-Meadow 1986; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow 1988). A group of forty-three 15-year-olds was videotaped while working on a control-of-variables task. The prediction from the earlier work would be that those subjects with a transitional mastery of the isolation-of-variables strategy would show greater gesture-speech mismatch during explanations of their testing than would subjects with consolidated mastery, or subjects exhibiting no access to the strategy. Gestural and spoken references to potential causal variables were coded independently. Although individual differences were evident in several indices of the frequency of gesture-speech mismatches, there was no evidence of any relation between these measures and measures of the status of subjects' knowledge of the control-of-variables strategy. Possible explanations for the discrepancy between the present findings and those of past studies are discussed in terms of the differing conceptual domains tapped by the two tasks and in terms of the types of gestures elicited by the tasks.
When asked to explain their beliefs about a concept, some children produce gestures that convey different information from the information conveyed in their speech (i.e., gesture-speech mismatches). Moreover, it is precisely the children who produce a large proportion of gesture-speech mismatches in their explanations of a concept who are particularly “ready” to benefit from instruction in that concept, and thus may be considered to be in a transitional state with respect to the concept. Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986) and Perry, Church and Goldin-Meadow (1988) studied this phenomenon with respect to two different concepts at two different ages and found that gesture-speech mismatch reliability predicts readiness to learn in both domains. In an attempt to test further the generality of gesture-speech mismatch as an index of transitional knowledge, Stone, Webb, and Mahootian (1991) explored this phenomenon in a group of 15-year-olds working on a problem-solving task. On this task, however, gesture-speech mismatch was not found to predict transitional knowledge. We present here a theoretical framework, which makes it clear why we expect gesture-speech mismatch to be a general index of transitional knowledge, and then use this framework to motivate our methodological practices for establishing gesture-speech mismatch as a predictor of transitional knowledge. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that, if these practices had been used by Stone et al., they too would have found that gesture-speech mismatch predicts transitional knowledge.
These studies explore children's conceptual knowledge as it is expressed through their verbal and gestural explanations of concepts. We build on previous work that has shown that children who produce a large proportion of gestures that do not match their verbal explanations are in transition with respect to the concept they are explaining. This gesture/speech mismatch has been called "discordance." Previous work discovered this phenomenon with respect to 5- to 7-year-old children's explanations of conservation problems. Study 1 shows: (1) that older children (10 to 11 years old) exhibit gesture/speech discordance with respect to another concept, understanding the equivalence relationship in mathematical equations, and; (2) that children who produce many discordant responses in their explanations of mathematical equivalence are more likely to benefit from instruction in the concept than are children who produce few such responses. Studies 2 and 3 explore the properties and usefulness of discordance as an index of transitional knowledge in a child's acquisition of mathematical equivalence. Under any circumstance in which new concepts are acquired, there exists a mental bridge connecting the old knowledge state to the new. The studies reported here suggest that the combination of gesture and speech may be an easily observable and significantly interpretable reflection of knowledge states, both static and in flux. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27122/1/0000114.pdf
Transitions in learning: Evidencefor multiple hypotheses
- Goldin-Meadow