The relationship between character viewpoint gesture and narrative structure in children

Abstract

When children tell stories, they gesture; their gestures can predict how their narrative abilities will progress. Five-year-olds who gestured from the point of view of a character (CVPT gesture) when telling stories produced better-structured narratives at later ages (Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). But does gesture just predict narrative structure, or can asking children to gesture in a particular way change their narratives? To explore this question, we instructed children to produce CVPT gestures and measured their narrative structure. Forty-four kindergarteners were asked to tell stories after being trained to produce CVPT gestures, gestures from an observer’s viewpoint (OVPT gestures), or after no instruction in gesture. Gestures were coded as CVPT or OVPT, and stories were scored for narrative structure. Children trained to produce CVPT gestures produced more of these gestures, and also had higher narrative structure scores compared to those who received the OVPT training. Children returned for a follow-up session one week later and narrated the stories again. The training received in the first session did not impact narrative structure or recall for the events of the stories. Overall, these results suggest a brief gestural intervention has the potential to enhance narrative structure. Due to the fact that stronger narrative abilities have been correlated with greater success in developing writing and reading skills at later ages, this research has important implications for literacy and education.

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

“…Additionally, recent evidence has shown that training children to produce such CVPT gestures also boosts their narrative structure scores immediately after training (Parrill, Lavanty, Bennett, Klco, & Demir, 2018).…”

“…For example, Demir, Levine, et al (2015) found evidence that 5‐year‐old children who expressed character viewpoint (CVPT) in their narratives by means of gestures were more likely to show better structure in the verbal narratives they produced when older. Additionally, recent evidence has shown that training children to produce such CVPT gestures also boosts their narrative structure scores immediately after training (Parrill, Lavanty, Bennett, Klco, & Demir, 2018).…”

Can co-speech gestures alone carry the mental time line?

“…For example, a number of gesture researchers are interested in the concept of viewpoint in gesture (Parrill, 2010, 2012; Stec, 2012), for example, when somebody is telling a story, they may adopt the viewpoint of the character mentioned in the story (character viewpoint), or the viewpoint of an external observer (observer viewpoint). This contrast has been shown to be relevant for studying children’s development of narrative skills (Parrill, Lavanty, Bennett, Klco, & Demir-Lira, 2018) and the development of mathematical concepts (Gerofsky, 2010). Crucially, interpreting quick switches between character viewpoint and observer viewpoint gestures depends on one’s ability to assume the perspective of the story teller.…”

Gesture production at encoding supports narrative recall

“…This scale was chosen to measure spatial ability in the current study as it explicitly taps into broad spatial and navigational abilities including directions. Given the narrative used in the current study involves directional content such as “turned right” and “his left”, a scale measuring directional ability rather than the mental rotation tasks sometimes used in previous studies examining spatial ability and gesture (e.g., Parrill et al, 2018 ) was deemed most appropriate. Items are measured on a seven-point Likert scale, where participants rate their strength of agreement to the statements, ranging from (1) strongly agree to (7) strongly disagree.…”

“…Narratives including spatial content, however, can have different characteristics: such narratives incorporate route directions, which require the processing of verbal, visual and motor information (Austin et al, 2018 ). Going beyond simple route directions, such narratives include both content and structure involved in narratives (see Parrill et al, 2018 , for an example of narrative structure), as well as spatial content such as directions. Following the GSA framework, if gesture production reflects motor activity, gestures may be particularly beneficial when performed in conjunction with tasks involving spatial content, such as narratives with explicit inclusion of spatial information such as directions, movements and locations.…”