Poster

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  Pine, Karen (University of Hertfordshire)
  Kirk, Elizabeth (University of Hertfordshire)

Children’s gestures tell us more than words can say

This poster summarises studies investigating the role of children’s gestures. Our fi ndings reveal that children convey information in their gestures that they cannot express verbally and that children’s knowledge emerges in gesture before speech. When children explained their ideas, their gestures and words did not always match - they expressed different information through the two modalities. These mismatches reliably predicted children’s learning. We found gestures helped children with linguistic access. Children were worse at naming items when they were prohibited from gesturing. When in a ‘tip-of-the tongue’ state (i.e. having diffi culty accessing a word) they resolved this state more when they were free to gesture than when they were not. In a further study we compared 40 children with a Specifi c Language Impairment (SLI) with normally developing children and found that those with SLI gestured more on the science task. These children also made less progress on the task when they were prevented from gesturing and their verbal dysfl uency increased. Together these studies shed light on the important role of the gestural system in helping children to think, speak and learn