Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching | Max Planck Institute
Skip to main content
Max Planck Institute for psycholinguistics
Contact
Log in
Search
Research
Research Facilities
Careers & Education
About us
News & Events
Breadcrumb
Max Planck Institute
News
Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching
Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching
28 May 2026
New study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.
New study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.
When adults teach children something new, words are only part of the story. A new cross-cultural study shows that adults from different cultures instinctively modify their gestures in similar ways to help children learn, suggesting that spontaneous human teaching may rely on a shared, deeply rooted communicative strategy.
Researchers found that although Italian adults used more gestures overall than Dutch adults, both groups increased the use of visually rich, two-handed gestures when demonstrating unfamiliar logic puzzles to children. The findings highlight how humans naturally adapt communication to support young learners, regardless of cultural background.
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.
These gestures can show how an action works, illustrate the shape of an object, or recreate a movement in space. For example, someone explaining how to crack an egg might mime the action with their hands while speaking. The new study explored how adults use these gestures when teaching children compared to adults, and whether those strategies differ across cultures.
FIGURE 1. The figure shows an overview of the study design. After an initial introduction, the speaker interacts with the toys and then demonstrates their use to the 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: 9-10-year-old children and other adults. The two groups were chosen because previous research suggests Italians come from a more ‘gesture-rich’ culture, while Dutch speakers tend to use fewer representational gestures overall.
As expected, Italian participants produced more representational gestures than Dutch participants across the demonstrations. However, 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.
The findings suggest that adults instinctively adapt demonstrations to make abstract or unfamiliar information clearer for younger audiences. “Humans are natural teachers, and our bodies are part of the lesson,” researcher Emanuela Campisi notes. “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.”
The study also examined ‘bracketed 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 during communication. Italians used them less often in adult-directed demonstrations.
However, when speaking to children, both groups converged on similar rates of bracketed gestures: another sign that adults across cultures may rely on common pedagogical instincts when teaching young learners.
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.
The work also expands cross-cultural research in developmental psychology by moving beyond broad comparisons between Western and non-Western societies and examining subtle differences within Europe itself.
A window into human cultural transmissionResearchers say the findings help illuminate how humans pass knowledge across generations: a process considered central to cultural evolution. 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 team hopes future studies will explore a wider range of cultures and teaching situations, while also examining how different gestural strategies affect children’s actual learning and comprehension. On top, the study suggests that while cultures may differ in how expressive people are, the instinct to physically shape communication for children may be something humans everywhere share.
PublicationCampisi E, Slonimska A, Ozyurek A. 2026 Showing how: adults across cultures use similar representational gestural strategies in demonstrations for children. R. Soc. Open Sci. 13: 251813. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251813
To news overview
Share this page
Research
Language & Genetics
Language Development
Multimodal Language
Neurobiology of Language
Psychology of Language
Research Groups
Collaborations
Research Reports
Research Facilities
MPI Labs
Donders Labs
Baby and Child Research Center
The MPI Archives
Library
IT Services
The Language Archive
Careers & Education
Vacancies
Working at the MPI
Equal Opportunities
Ombudsperson
IMPRS Graduate School
PhD Representatives
Research Staff Committee
DEI Committee
About us
History Timeline
Institute Leadership
People
Operations Department
Advisory Boards
Data Protection Committee
Publications
Former Departments
Visitors & Newcomers
News & Events
News
Events
Nijmegen Lectures
Press and PR Office
Q&A
Contact
Log in
Contact
Wundtlaan 1
6525 XD Nijmegen
The Netherlands
+31 (0)24-3521911
Follow us
An Institute of the
Max Planck Society
for the Advancement
of Science
Colophon
Data Protection information
Imprint |
A new cross-cultural study by Emanuela Campisi, Anita Slominska, and Asli Ozyurek investigated how Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures when teaching new concepts to children, revealing a shared instinct in spontaneous human teaching. The research suggests that adults from different cultural backgrounds instinctively modify their gestures in similar ways to aid young learners, indicating that impromptu instruction may rely on a common communicative strategy.
Human communication is fundamentally multimodal, incorporating speech alongside gestures, facial expressions, gaze, and body movements, with representational gestures playing a key role in teaching and explanation by depicting actions or spatial relationships. The study examined how adults used these gestures when interacting with children compared to other adults, taking into account pre-existing cultural differences noted in previous research regarding gesture use. While Italian adults generally employed more gestures than Dutch adults, both groups increased their use of visually rich, two-handed gestures when demonstrating unfamiliar logic puzzles to children.
The key finding is that despite differences in overall gestural use based on cultural context, both groups converged on similar strategies for teaching children. Specifically, adults across both cultures displayed similar rates of using bracketed gestures—where one hand remains still while the other moves—when addressing children. This convergence implies that adults possess intuitive pedagogical instincts for making demonstrations clearer and more engaging for young audiences, supporting theories related to folk pedagogy.
The research suggests that adults naturally adapt their communication to support learning by employing what the authors term multimodal scaffolding, a flexible system combining speech and visual signals tailored to the learner's needs. Furthermore, the findings illuminate how humans transmit knowledge across generations through this multimodal process. The study underscores that while cultural expression varies, the instinct to physically shape communication for children appears to be a universal human trait, demonstrating a shared, deeply rooted strategy for teaching. Future work is recommended to investigate how these specific gestural strategies impact children's actual learning and comprehension across various educational settings. |