Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Gestures help us understand language (e.g., Hostetter, 2011). However, less is known about how good gestures must beto facilitate word learning. Turkish-speaking preschoolers learned five English verbs with corresponding iconic gestures,varying in the verb-gesture match (i.e., how well the gesture represented the verb), in a one-on-one lesson led by either ahuman adult or the humanoid robot NAO. Our preliminary results (N = 43) suggest that the verb-gesture match predictsword learning, and this match might even be more important when the robot was the tutor (though the interaction was notstatistically significant). In addition, while both tutors were effective in teaching verbs, preschoolers learned better withthe robot than with the human. This study not only makes a theoretical contribution by demonstrating the effects of thematch between words and iconic gestures, but also provides practical implications for designing of robot- and human-ledL2 lessons.