Encouraging kids to beat: Children's beat gesture production boosts their narrative performance

Abstract

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).

The Value of Non-Referential Gestures: A Systematic Review of Their Cognitive and Linguistic Effects in Children’s Language Development

“…However, the studies differed in the main goal of the research. While the study by [ 83 ] examined the effects of having children observe beat gestures as part of a short narrative training task on their narrative performance in a posttest, the study by [ 84 ] investigated whether encouraging children to produce beat gestures could also affect their subsequent narrative performance.…”

“…The second study [ 84 ] used the same narrative training paradigm employed in the previous study but assessed whether having children not only observe but also encouraging them to produce beat gestures would enhance the effects seen in [ 83 ]. In this case, 47 5- to 6-year-old children ( M = 5.92 years, SD = 0.54) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: beat encouraging condition and beat non-encouraging condition.…”

“…The fact that non-referential gestures are a strong discourse framing mechanism ( [48,51,67], and others) is an indication that they might constitute a powerful tool for assessment in TD populations. We reviewed here two studies in which non-referential gestures were successfully used in narratives to improve the narrative production skills of TD children [83,84]. Moreover, future investigations could extend these findings to populations with language disorders.…”

“…Finally, the two training studies in our selection revealed that training in oral narratives using non-referential gestures offers benefits, in terms of not only narrative structure but also oral fluency [ 83 , 84 ]. Both studies showed that a brief training session with non-referential gestures is valuable for narrative production, revealing a causal link between these gestures and narrative gains in the production of narratives ––a complex linguistic skill––at 5 to 6 years of age.…”

“…Although there are two training studies with TD children that have been reviewed in this paper [ 83 , 84 ], training studies conducted with non-TD children have to date not focused specifically on the role of multimodality. For instance, no previous training studies involving gestures as an empirical condition have assessed the value of narrative and sociopragmatic training in ASD or in language disorders [ 98 , 99 , 100 ].…”