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

Abstract

Speakers produce both referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, and non-referential gestures, which lack semantic content. While a large number of studies have demonstrated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of referential gestures as well as their precursor and predictive role in both typically developing (TD) and non-TD children, less is known about non-referential gestures in cognitive and complex linguistic domains, such as narrative development. This paper is a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the research concerned with assessing the effects of non-referential gestures in such domains. A search of the literature turned up 11 studies, collectively involving 898 2- to 8-year-old TD children. Although they yielded contradictory evidence, pointing to the need for further investigations, the results of the six studies–in which experimental tasks and materials were pragmatically based–revealed that non-referential gestures not only enhance information recall and narrative comprehension but also act as predictors and causal mechanisms for narrative performance. This suggests that their bootstrapping role in language development is due to the fact that they have important discourse–pragmatic functions that help frame discourse. These findings should be of particular interest to teachers and future studies could extend their impact to non-TD children.

Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground

“…On the other hand, our results also reinforce the predictive value of non-referential gestures found in Vilà-Giménez et al’s (2021a) study, supporting the idea that these gestures may play an important discourse-pragmatic role starting early in children’s language development. Overall, our results strongly support the view that the bootstrapping and predictive role of non-referential gestures in children’s narrative development has its roots in their pragmatic and discursive properties, and they may be key when explaining why non-referential gestures have been reported to be so relevant in children’s narrative discourse abilities (see Vilà-Giménez and Prieto, 2021 , for a review).…”

“…Importantly, we suspect that the ability to use manual non-referential gestures to mark IS might be related to children’s more complex cognitive and linguistic processes, such as narrative or pragmatic abilities (see Vilà-Giménez and Prieto, 2021 , for a review), or more complex cognitive skills, such as Theory of Mind (ToM; e.g., Carmiol and Sparks, 2014 ; Graf and Davies, 2014 ), which emerge and evolve at this stage in development. While research has demonstrated the link between non-referential gestures and narrative development, as far as we know, there is no previous study that assesses how these gestures relate to ToM.…”

“…However, recent developmental evidence leads us to believe that non-referential gestures are essential in framing and bootstrapping children’s development of complex narrative discourse abilities. These studies have shown that non-referential (beat) gestures do not only benefit cognitive processes, such as information recall and comprehension (e.g., Austin and Sweller, 2014 ; Igualada et al, 2017 ; Llanes-Coromina et al, 2018 ), but can also act as predictors and causal mechanisms on children’s narrative discourse performance (see Vilà-Giménez and Prieto, 2021 , for a review). On the one hand, longitudinal studies have documented that early non-referential (beat) gestures (produced in parent–child naturalistic interactions) predict better structured narrative productions in later stages of children’s language development ( Vilà-Giménez et al, 2021a ).…”

Introduction to Language Development in Children: Description to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties

“…Several studies in this Special Issue describe important factors that affect language development at different ages, thus depicting several key aspects to be considered in the prevention of communication and language difficulties throughout childhood. These studies range from the beginnings of word production [4] or gestures [5] to the impact of the use of technological devices in preadolescent children [6]. In addition, they cover different aspects or linguistic components, from phonetics [7], vocabulary [4], or syntax [8], to non-referential gestures related to narrative development [5].…”

Agricultural Machinery Virtual Assembly System Using Dynamic Gesture Recognitive Interaction Based on a CNN and LSTM Network

“…After analysis [21,22], gesture behaviours were mostly expressed by index finger depiction, such as writing and drawing. Capturing index finger behaviour required collecting the following feature values: three components of position, three components of rotation angle, and three components of an index finger, as shown in Figure 3.…”