The Effects of Emblematic Gestures on the Development and Access of Mental Representations of French Expressions

Abstract

The study investigated the effect of emblematic gestures on the development and access of mental representations of French expressions. The major hypothesis of the study was that learning emblematic gestures with simultaneously presented French expressions would cause an increased depth of processing as measured by greater retention. The second hypothesis was that recall would persist over time. A pretest posttest repeated measures design was used. Three groups consisting of 112 first‐semester university French students participated in the study. The experimental group learned the gestures and used them to recall the expressions in the posttest. The no‐treatment group did not see the gestures at any time. The comparison group did not learn the gestures, but did see them in the posttest. Results of analysis of variance (ANOVA) performed on the posttest scores revealed that learning emblematic gestures simultaneously with French expressions does lead to greater recall. Secondly, although all groups experienced a decay in recall, the groups that saw the emblematic gestures forgot significantly fewer sentences than the group that did not see the gestures.