Rohrer, Patrick LouisFlorit-Pons, JúliaVilà-Giménez, IngridPrieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-2022-11-252022-11-252022Rohrer PL, Florit-Pons J, Vilà-Giménez I, Prieto P. Children use non-referential gestures in narrative speech to mark discourse elements which update common ground. Front Psychol. 2022;12:661339. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6613391664-1078http://hdl.handle.net/10230/55003While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or -accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) and gesture referentiality in children’s narrative speech from a developmental perspective. A longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children at two different time points in development was coded for IS and gesture referentiality (i.e., referential and non-referential gestures). Results revealed that at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information. Further, at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more nonreferential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures. In terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns. This relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. All in all, our findings offer supporting evidence that in contrast with referential gestures, nonreferential gestures have been found to play a key role in marking IS, and that the development of this relationship solidifies at a period in development that coincides with a spurt in non-referential gesture production.application/pdfeng© 2022 Rohrer, Florit-Pons, Vilà-Giménez and Prieto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661339Information structure (IS)Discourse referentsReferential gestureNon-referential gestureMultimodal developmentNarrative discourseChild developmentinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess