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When the words just won't come, try gesticulating.

That's the advice of researchers at the University of Alberta who studied the link between gestures and speech and found that hand movements could improve your access to language.

“What we think is going on here is that the very fact of moving your hands around helps you recall parts of the story,” lead researcher Elena Nicoladis, who teaches at the school's psychology department, said in the report.

“The gestures help you access memory and language so that you can tell more of the story.”

The study looked at the hand gestures of bilingual children who told the same story twice, once in one language and then again in another.

The findings showed that children used hand gestures more in the language they considered to be their strongest – a surprise for researchers, who had expected the youngsters to use more gestures in their weaker language to help them communicate the story.

“Initially, we thought gestures were related to meaning, that they meant something on their own,” Ms. Nicoladis said. “But now we believe they are more related to language.”

The findings also back up those in another study in which Ms. Nicoladis and her colleagues found that Chinese women who spoke English at a higher level than Chinese men also exhibited more hand gestures when talking in English.

The new research, she said, could come in handy for people who have difficulty speaking, such as students studying English as a second language or some elderly people.

“If you're in a situation where it's more important to get the language out and you're having difficulty, it may help to start making gestures,” she said.