The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

High-income parents gesture more than low-income parents, research finds. And it’s not just the quantity of gesture that differs but also the quality: more affluent parents provide a greater variety of types of gesture, representing more categories of meaning—physical objects, abstract concepts, social signals. Parents and children from poorer backgrounds, meanwhile, tend to use a narrower range of gestures when they interact with each other. Following the example set by their parents, high-income kids gesture more than their low-income counterparts. In one study, fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of twenty-four different meanings during a ninety-minute observation session, while children from lower-income families conveyed only thirteen meanings. Four years later, when it was time to start school, children from the richer families scored an average of 117 on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, compared to 93 for children from the poorer families.