The effects of prohibiting gestures on children's lexical retrieval ability

Abstract

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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“…Nevertheless, future research should aim to control the number of visual elements contained within pictures in the two conditions. Our lack of a main effect of gesture condition on the production of filler terms or proportion of speech time spent pausing is in accordance with some (e.g., Beattie & Coughlan, 1999;Hostetter & Skirving, 2011;Ravizza, 2003) but not all past research (e.g., Frick-Horbury & Guttentag, 1998;Pine, Bird, & Kirk, 2007). Our study eliminated the potential distraction of participants in one condition being told to remain still, suggesting that previous findings might have been due to the divided attention necessary to perform the task in that condition.…”

How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis.

“…Put another way, according to the Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis, gestural facilitation of lexical retrieval may be a down-stream effect of gesture activating spatio-motoric representations. This perspective provides a potential interpretation for the inconsistent findings in the literature regarding gestural facilitation of lexical retrieval-Frick-Horbury and Guttentag (1998) and Pine, Bird and Kirk (2007) reported evidence that gesture facilitates lexical retrieval, but Beattie and Coughlan (1999) did not. It may be that in some cases, participants' gestures did not activate spatio-motoric features that were strongly associated with target words in the word retrieval tasks, so they did not facilitate lexical retrieval.…”

Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development

“…Goldin-Meadow, 2003) and on lexical access in children (e.g. Pine et al, 2007), even these studies do not typically discuss explicitly what defines some gestures as compensatory. In studies of adult L2 users' gestural behaviours, theoretical discussions of gestural compensation are almost entirely absent.…”

“…The focus has traditionally been on lexis and meaning, but lexical access, grammar, discourse, conceptualisation, and problems of linearising global information have all been implicated in gestural compensation (Alibali et al, 2000;Gullberg, 1999Gullberg, , 2006aHostetter, Alibali, & Kita, 2007;Pine, Bird, & Kirk, 2007).…”