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Bel and Dr. Wolfram Hinzen for their comments, and also to the Prosodic Studies Group in Barcelona. Special thanks to Joan Borràs-Comes for helping with the statistical analyses and to Judith Llanes-Coromina for helping with data collection. Many thanks also go to Clara Nogué and Anna Reixach who performed our stimulus recordings. We would like to thank all the audiovisual technicians at Universitat Pompeu Fabra for helping us with recording and editing. This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and has been funded by a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2015-66533-P "Intonational and gestural meaning in language") and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR_925) to the Prosodic Studies Group. The first author also acknowledges an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (ref. 2017FI_B_00297).

In this paper, we advance a comprehensive gesture labelling proposal which highlights the independence of the prosodic and semantic properties of different gesture types and at the same time challenges a simplistic definition of beat gestures as biphasic rhythmic non-meaningful gestures (e.g., [1][2]). Following McNeill's [3] original proposal on gesture dimensions, we defend that all gesture types can associate with prosodic prominence, and even though beat gestures typically display this rhythmic behavior, this is also the case with other representational and pointing gestures too. Second, with respect to meaning, while beat gestures do not represent referential nor metaphoric content, they can serve a range of meaningful pragmatic and discursive functions in speech, which deserve to be further investigated. From a practical point of view, we propose that all non-referential gestures be initially classified as forms of beat gestures with a set of associated properties related to gesture form, prosodic form and pragmatic form. This gesture labelling proposal independently codes for (a) the form of gestures, (b) their properties of temporal association with prosodic prominence, and (c) their pragmatic meaning. We claim that this move allows for a more complete analysis of gestures in large-scale studies and opens the way for more comprehensive assessments of the interaction between gesture forms, prosodic forms, and semantic forms using labelled corpora.

have also shown that narrative ability is a strong predictor of later school literacy success (e.g. see Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2012, for a review; Naremore, Densmore, & Harman, 1995). As Demir et al. (2012) claim, narrative skill is 'an oral language skill that is argued to provide the missing link between oral language and later reading comprehension' (p. 6) and 'oral language skills that develop during early ages and provide the foundation for later reading comprehension include vocabulary, syntax, narrative and academic language use' (p. 5).

Speakers produce both referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, and non-referential gestures, which lack semantic content. While a large number of studies have demonstrated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of referential gestures as well as their precursor and predictive role in both typically developing (TD) and non-TD children, less is known about non-referential gestures in cognitive and complex linguistic domains, such as narrative development. This paper is a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the research concerned with assessing the effects of non-referential gestures in such domains. A search of the literature turned up 11 studies, collectively involving 898 2- to 8-year-old TD children. Although they yielded contradictory evidence, pointing to the need for further investigations, the results of the six studies–in which experimental tasks and materials were pragmatically based–revealed that non-referential gestures not only enhance information recall and narrative comprehension but also act as predictors and causal mechanisms for narrative performance. This suggests that their bootstrapping role in language development is due to the fact that they have important discourse–pragmatic functions that help frame discourse. These findings should be of particular interest to teachers and future studies could extend their impact to non-TD children.

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A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential beats significantly (p < .01) predicted later narrative productions. The pragmatic functions of the children's speech that accompany these gestures were also analyzed in a representative sample of 18 parent-child dyads, revealing that beats were typically associated with biased assertions or questions. These findings show that the early use of beats predicts narrative abilities later in development, and suggest that this relation is likely due to the pragmatic-structuring function that beats reflect in early discourse.Children's early gesturing not only precedes but also predicts simple linguistic milestones (e.g., Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Given the fact that oral language skills play a role in subsequent successful school literacy (Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2012;Naremore, Densmore, & Harman, 1995), it becomes important to ask whether the early production of gestures also predicts more complex language skills, such as narrative skills, at later stages of development.Two previous longitudinal studies have demonstrated that the production of referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, produced in narrative discourses predicts later narrative abilities (Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2015; Vil a-Gim enez, Demir-Lira, & Prieto, 2020). Demir et al. (2015) examined the predictive value of referential iconic character-viewpoint (CVPT) gestures. In these cases, the gesturer takes on the role of the character, using one or more parts of their own body to directly represent the character's correspondingWe are grateful to the participating children themselves and their families that participated in the larger longitudinal study of language development from which our study was drawn. We thank Dr. Joan Borr as-Comes for helping with the statistical analyses. We also express our gratitude to Dr. S ßeyda € Ozc ßalıs ßkan, Dr. Maria Graziano and Prof. Dr. Katharina Rohlfing for their inspiring comments. We also thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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