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 transmission

Researchers 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.
 

Publication
Campisi 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