Both children and adults have been shown to benefit from the integration of multisensory and sensorimotor enrichment into pedagogy. For example, integrating pictures or gestures into foreign language (L2) vocabulary learning can improve learning outcomes relative to unisensory learning. However, whereas adults seem to benefit to a greater extent from sensorimotor enrichment such as the performance of gestures in contrast to multisensory enrichment with pictures, this is not the case in elementary school children. Here, we compared multisensory- and sensorimotor-enriched learning in an intermediate age group that falls between the age groups tested in previous studies (elementary school children and young adults), in an attempt to determine the developmental time point at which children’s responses to enrichment mature from a child-like pattern into an adult-like pattern. Twelve-year-old and fourteen-year-old German children were trained over 5 consecutive days on auditorily presented, concrete and abstract, Spanish vocabulary. The vocabulary was learned under picture-enriched, gesture-enriched, and non-enriched (auditory-only) conditions. The children performed vocabulary recall and translation tests at 3 days, 2 months, and 6 months post-learning. Both picture and gesture enrichment interventions were found to benefit children’s L2 learning relative to non-enriched learning up to 6 months post-training. Interestingly, gesture-enriched learning was even more beneficial than picture-enriched learning for the 14-year-olds, while the 12-year-olds benefitted equivalently from learning enriched with pictures and gestures. These findings provide evidence for opting to integrate gestures rather than pictures into L2 pedagogy starting at 14 years of age.

已证明儿童和成人都受益于将多感觉和感觉运动丰富整合到教学法中。例如，将图片或手势整合到外语 (L2) 词汇学习中可以相对于无感觉学习提高学习成果。然而，虽然成人似乎在更大程度上受益于感觉运动的丰富，例如手势的表现，与图片的多感觉丰富相比，小学生的情况并非如此。在这里，我们比较了介于之前研究中测试的年龄组（小学生和年轻人）之间的中间年龄组的多感觉和感觉运动丰富的学习，试图确定儿童对丰富的反应从类似儿童的模式成熟为类似成人的模式的发育时间点。12 岁和 14 岁的德国儿童接受了连续 5 天以上的听觉、具体和抽象的西班牙语词汇培训。词汇是在图片丰富、手势丰富和非丰富（仅听觉）条件下学习的。孩子们在学习后 3 天、2 个月和 6 个月进行了词汇回忆和翻译测试。在训练后长达 6 个月的时间里，与非丰富学习相比，图片和手势丰富干预都被发现有益于儿童的第二语言学习。有趣的是，对于 14 岁的孩子来说，手势丰富的学习比图片丰富的学习更有益，而 12 岁的孩子则同样受益于丰富的图片和手势学习。这些发现为选择从 14 岁开始将手势而不是图片整合到第二语言教学法中提供了证据。