Temporal integration of gesture and speech in narrative discourse: an insight into the development of co-speech gesture use

Abstract

Five-year-old children have been shown to start producing non-referential beat gestures in narrative speech. However, it remains unclear how the use of these gestures along with referential iconic gestures evolves over time in children’s narrative discourse, and how the temporal integration between gestures and prosodic prominence develops. This study examines changes in gesture production and gesture-speech alignment using a longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children who produced two elicited retellings at two different time points, i.e. at 5-6 years and two years later. Results revealed that the proportion of non-referential gestures increased during development while referential iconics decreased —total numbers did not show a decrease in iconic gestures. Also, gesture-speech alignment was found to be target-like at the two time points, both for referential and non-referential gestures, suggesting that by age five, children have acquired the ability to temporally integrate gesture and speech in narrative discourse.