I went to an interesting seminar yesterday which discussed the use of gestures in bilinguals and monolinguals. Research in Canada and China found that bilinguals tend to gesture more overall than monolinguals, and that they gesture more in their less dominant language. It was also found that gestures were most frequent when people were trying to remember words – the tip of the tongue phenomenon – and that participants in the study who were told to keep their hands still found it harder to recall words.

Here’s an abstract of the talk (Word doc).

Do you gesture more in some languages than in others?

Do you use more gestures when trying to retrieve words?