Susan Goldin-Meadow is the 2021 Recipient of the Rumelhart Prize. Goldin-Meadow's body of research addresses the roles of gesture in language creation, communication, learning, and cognition. In one major strand of her research, Goldin-Meadow has studied gestures in children who are not exposed to any structured language input, specifically, deaf children of hearing parents who do not expose their children to sign language. These children create a highly structured, language-like system with their hands—a homesign. In another major strand, Goldin-Meadow has (...) focused on the gestures that people produce along with speech. She has examined how gestures contribute to producing and comprehending language at the moment of speaking or signing, how gestures contribute to learning language and to learning other concepts and skills, and how gestures may actually constitute and change people's thinking. This topic collection is made up of papers that represent and extend these strands of Goldin-Meadow's work. This introductory article provides a brief biography of Goldin-Meadow, and it highlights ways in which the contributions to the topic collection exemplify several notable characteristics of Goldin-Meadow's body of work, including (1) a focus on multiple timescales of behavior and behavior change; (2) use of diverse methods, approaches, and populations; and (3) considerations of equity and inclusion, both in research and in educational and clinical practice. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner (D&P) argue that nondeclarative knowledge can take multiple forms. We provide empirical support for this from two related lines of research about the development of mathematical reasoning. We then describe how different forms of procedural and declarative knowledge can be effectively modeled in Anderson's ACT-R theory, contrasting this computational approach with D&P's logical approach. The computational approach suggests that the commonly observed developmental progression from more implicit to more explicit knowledge can be viewed as a consequence of (...) accumulating and strengthening mental representations. (shrink)

How do teachers’ gestures influence students’ learning? This article reviews research investigating the role of gestures in communication, focusing on teachers’ communication with their students, primarily in mathematics and science instruction. We first briefly consider gesture's role in communication more generally as a backdrop for considering teaching as a special context for communication. We then describe teachers’ spontaneous gesturing in teaching contexts, and we consider how teachers’ spontaneous gestures might influence students’ learning. We then consider experimental studies that provide causal (...) support for the effects of teachers’ gestures on students’ learning. We conclude by discussing future directions and implications for educational practice. (shrink)

Gesture does not have a fixed position in the Dienes & Perner framework. Its status depends on the way knowledge is expressed. Knowledge reflected in gesture can be fully implicit (neither factuality nor predication is explicit) if the goal is simply to move a pointing hand to a target. Knowledge reflected in gesture can be explicit (both factuality and predication are explicit) if the goal is to indicate an object. However, gesture is not restricted to these two extreme positions. When (...) gestures are unconscious accompaniments to speech and represent information that is distinct from speech, the knowledge they convey is factuality-implicit but predication-explicit. (shrink)