This research extends the range of domains within which children's gestures are found to play an important role in learning. The study involves children learning about balance, and the authors locate children's gestures within a relevant model of cognitive development-the representational redescription model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The speech and gestures of children explaining a balance task were examined. Approximately one third of the children expressed one idea in speech and another in gesture. These children made significantly more learning gains than children whose gestures and speech matched. Children's gestures were an indicator, at pretest, of readiness to learn and of cognitive gains. The authors conclude that children's gestures provide crucial insight into their cognitive state and illuminate the process of learning and representational change.

Two experiments explored children's spelling development in the context of the Representational-Redescription Model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Fifty-one 5-7 year old children (experiment one) and 44 5-6 year olds (experiment two) were assessed, via spelling production and recognition tasks, for phonological to morphological spelling development and representational levels derived from the RR model respectively.Children were allocated to one of the Nunes, Bindman and Bryant's (1997) stages for spelling production and to one of the representational levels derived from the RR model for spelling recognition and accompanying verbal justifications indicating their knowledge and understanding of spelling. These results are discussed in terms of how the R-R model accounts for the, hitherto unexplained cognitive mechanisms that underlie spelling development and the notion of multi-representation in spelling.Key phrases: Spelling development, RR model Spelling development in young children: A case of Representational-Redescription?This study focuses on spelling development in young children and whether this can be understood in the context of Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) RepresentationalRedescription (RR) model (see Steffler, 2001). The RR model describes how knowledge is represented in the cognitive system and how this knowledge changes with development. This is the first study to investigate the validity of the model for understanding spelling development. We will briefly discuss current views from the spelling literature about how spelling develops in young children. Early stage models (e.g. Frith, 1985) proposed that children gradually become more sophisticated in their spelling passing from an early "alphabetic stage" based on phonology and letter-sound correspondences to a later more sophisticated "orthographic stage" where higher order knowledge about spelling is acquired.Drawing upon this evidence and other more recent studies, Steffler (2001) concluded that a consensus has been reached within the literature, that spelling progresses from a visually based, phonological level, to a higher-order morphological level and then to a level where both of these aspects are taken into account, resulting in the correct production of spelling.Nunes, Bindman and Bryant (1997) provided support for this progression with a longitudinal study over three years using groups of children, aged 6, 7 and 8. At each of three sessions, participants did a spelling test of 30 words consisting of 10 regular past tense verbs, e.g. called; 10 irregular past tense verbs, e.g. slept; and 10 nonverbs, e.g., bird. Their results suggested that children progress through five developmental stages when learning the spelling of word endings. At stage one the spelling of word endings Spelling development: Representational-Redescription? 4 was found to be unsystematic and with little resemblance to either the end sound or to the conventional -ed. In some cases the last sound was not spelt at all. At stage two endings were frequently phonetic (i.e. sp...

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher et al., 1996) sees gestures as functioning more at the level of speech production in helping the speaker to find the right words. The latter hypothesis has not been fully explored with children. In this study children were given a naming task under conditions that allowed and restricted gestures. Children named more words correctly and resolved more 'tip-of-the-tongue' states when allowed to gesture than when not, suggesting that gestures facilitate access to the lexicon in children and are important for speech production as well as conceptualization.-3 -The effects of prohibiting gestures on children's ability to retrieve words Like adults, children frequently gesture with their hands when they speak. The question about why gestures are so ubiquitous, even in the absence of a listener (people gesture, for example, when speaking on the telephone) has prompted theorists to debate their function. This paper addresses the issue of how gesturing helps the speaker, particularly the young child.The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) suggests that gestures facilitate the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. On the other hand there is a view that gestures function more at the level of producing the surface utterance, by helping the speaker retrieve the right word: the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher , . Thus, where the

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