Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching

Source: Hacker News

Teaching with the hands

Human communication is fundamentally multimodal, combining speech with gestures, facial expressions, gaze, and body movements. Among these, representational gestures—gestures that visually depict meaning—play a crucial role in teaching and explanation. They can show how an action works, illustrate the shape of an object, or recreate a movement in space (e.g., mimicking cracking an egg while speaking).

The study explored how adults use these gestures when teaching children compared to teaching other adults, and whether those strategies differ across cultures.

Figure 1. Overview of the study design. After an initial introduction, the speaker interacts with the toys and then demonstrates their use to two different audiences: an adult and a child.

Comparing Italian and Dutch communication styles

The researchers asked 16 Italian and 16 Dutch adults to demonstrate two novel logic puzzles to two different audiences: 9‑ to 10‑year‑old children and other adults. Italians were selected because previous research suggests they come from a more “gesture‑rich” culture, whereas Dutch speakers tend to use fewer representational gestures overall.

• Overall gesture frequency: Italian participants produced more representational gestures than Dutch participants across all demonstrations.
• Gesture type adaptation: Neither group simply increased the total number of gestures when speaking to children. Instead, both groups changed the type of gestures they used.

A shared strategy for helping children learn

Across both cultures, adults used significantly more two‑handed representational gestures when teaching children. Researchers believe these gestures increase iconicity, making explanations more visually informative and easier for children to understand.

“Humans are natural teachers, and our bodies are part of the lesson,” notes researcher Emanuela Campisi. “Even when cultures differ in how much people gesture overall, adults seem to share intuitive strategies for making demonstrations clearer and more engaging for children.”

Bracketed gestures

The study also examined bracketed gestures—gestures in which one hand remains still while the other moves. Dutch adults used these gestures more frequently when explaining puzzles to other adults, possibly to help organize and anchor information. Italians used them less often in adult‑directed demonstrations. However, when speaking to children, both groups converged on similar rates of bracketed gestures, further indicating a common pedagogical instinct.

Understanding folk pedagogy

The findings support theories of folk pedagogy, the idea that humans possess intuitive teaching strategies based on assumptions about what learners need to understand. Importantly, the study examined spontaneous, semi‑naturalistic teaching interactions rather than formal classroom instruction. Participants were ordinary adults communicating with real, naïve listeners, allowing researchers to capture how teaching unfolds in everyday life.

A window into human cultural transmission

By combining speech with gestures and other visual signals, adults create what researchers describe as multimodal scaffolding—a flexible communication system tailored to learners’ needs. The results illuminate how humans pass knowledge across generations, a process central to cultural evolution.

The team hopes future studies will explore a wider range of cultures and teaching situations, and examine how different gestural strategies affect children’s actual learning and comprehension. The study suggests that while cultures may differ in overall expressiveness, the instinct to physically shape communication for children may be a universal human trait.

Publication

Campisi E, Slonimska A, Ozyurek A. 2026. Showing how: adults across cultures use similar representational gestural strategies in demonstrations for children. Royal Society Open Science 13: 251813. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251813