It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and how gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the simultaneity of speech and gesture matters when children receive instruction from a teacher (Congdon et al., 2017). In Study 1, we ask whether simultaneity also matters when children themselves are the ones who produce speech and gesture strategies. Third-graders (N = 75) were taught to produce one strategy in speech and one strategy in gesture for correctly solving mathematical equivalence problems; they were told to produce these strategies either simultaneously (S + G) or sequentially (S➔G; G➔S) during a training session. Learning was assessed immediately after training, at a 24-h follow-up, and at a 4-week follow-up. Children showed evidence of learning and retention across all three conditions. Study 2 was conducted to explore whether it was the special relationship between speech and gesture that helped children learn. Third-graders (N = 87) were taught an action strategy instead of a gesture strategy; all other aspects of the design were the same. Children again learned across all three conditions. But only children who produced simultaneous speech and action retained what they had learned at the follow-up sessions. Results have implications for why gesture is beneficial to learners and, taken in relation to previous literature, reveal differences in the mechanisms by which doing versus seeing gesture facilitates learning.

手势可以促进学习，这是众所周知的，但是了解利用手势的最佳方法以及手势如何帮助学习者仍然是一个未解决的问题。在这里，我们认为可以使手势成为强大的教学工具的属性之一：其与口语的时间对齐。先前的工作表明，当孩子接受老师的指导时，言语和手势的同步性很重要（Congdon等人，2017）。在研究1中，我们询问当孩子自己是产生言语和手势策略的孩子时，同时性是否也重要？三年级学生（Ñ = 75）被教导如何正确地解决数学对等问题的语音策略和手势策略；在培训期间，他们被告知同时（S + G）或顺序（S➔G；G➔S）制定这些策略。训练后，24小时随访和4周随访中立即评估学习。儿童在所有三种情况下均显示出学习和保留的证据。进行了研究2，以探讨语音和手势之间的特殊关系是否有助于儿童学习。三年级学生（N  = 87）被教给他们一种动作策略而不是手势策略；设计的所有其他方面都相同。孩子们再次在这三个条件下学习。但是只有那些同时产生的孩子言语和行动保留了他们在后续会议上学到的东西。结果暗示了为什么手势对学习者有益，并且与以前的文献相比，揭示了做手势和看手势有助于学习的机制的差异。