Preschoolers' narrative abilities are related to gesture accuracy but not to gesture rate

Abstract

Gesture accuracy has been related to the development of grammar between 24 and 30 months of age (Bates & Dick, 2002) and to the development of narrative skills (Castillo-Sánchez, 2019). However, less is known about whether narrative skills are also related to gesture frequency in younger populations in naturalistic settings and how gesture accuracy and gesture frequency differ in this context. The present study asks whether preschoolers’ narrative abilities are related to two measures of gesture use, namely (i) gesture rates, and (ii) gesture accuracy. A total of 34 3- to 4-year-old children participated in a multimodal imitation task, gesture production task and a narrative task. Results show that narrative abilities positively correlate with gesture accuracy, but not with gesture rate, proving that language and gesture are integrated systems and that complementary measures of gesture performance can help us assess the relationship between gesture and language development.