Gesture–speech integration in narrative

Abstract

Speakers sometimes express information in gestures that they do not express in speech. In this research, we developed a system that could be used to assess the redundancy of gesture and speech in a narrative task. We then applied this system to examine whether children and adults produce non-redundant gesture–speech combinations at similar rates. The coding system was developed based on a sample of 30 children. A crucial feature of the system is that gesture meanings can be assessed based on form alone; thus, the meanings speakers express in gesture and speech can be assessed independently and compared. We then collected narrative data from a new sample of 17 children (ages 5–10), as well as a sample of 20 adults, and we determined the average proportion of non-redundant gesture–speech combinations produced by individuals in each group. Children produced more non-redundant gesture–speech combinations than adults, both at the clause level and at the word level. These findings suggest that gesture–speech integration is not constant over the life span, but instead appears to change with development.

Children's creation of algorithms: simulations and gestures

“…It is this capacity that predicts their performance in inferential tasks (Barrouillet, Grosset, & Lecas, 2000). Moreover, they tend to make more gestures than adults even as their speech develops (e.g., Alibali, Evans, et al, 2009;Chu & Kita, 2008;Colletta et al, 2015). We accordingly investigated children of around the age of ten years.…”

Cognitive skills and gesture–speech redundancy

“…We classified speakers as spatial dominant, verbal dominant, or equally matched on the basis of the difference in their performance on a spatial visualization test and a verbal fluency test. We used the coding procedure developed by Alibali et al (2009) to code speakers' gesture-speech redundancy as they narrated an animated cartoon. Spatial-dominant speakers produced a higher proportion of non-redundant gesture-speech combinations than other speakers.…”

“…Even when children completely understand the event they are describing and know exactly which aspects of their spatial knowledge they wish to articulate, their vocabularies may not contain the words they need to describe the precise spatial or motor properties of the events they are thinking about. Indeed, Alibali et al (2009) found that children aged 5 to 10 produced non-redundant gesture-speech combinations while narrating a cartoon at a rate more than twice that of adults. Further, the children studied by Alibali et al seemed particularly likely to produce non-redundant gestures when they were having trouble formulating their ideas into speech.…”

Encouraging children to produce rhythmic beat gestures leads to better narrative discourse performances

“…Pretest and posttest consisted of the children retelling what they had seen in four short (~41-50 s) animated cartoons about a small mouse and his friends (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln, http://www.wdrmaus.de, [2,34]), which were previously unfamiliar to the children. The video clips contained only background music, without any speech.…”