  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 fourteen-year-olds, while the twelve-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 fourteen years of age.
