The Relation Between Cognitive Abilities and the Distribution of Semantic Features Across Speech and Gesture in 4-year-olds

• Main Authors: Abramov, O. (Author), Kern, F. (Author), Kopp, S. (Author), Koutalidis, S. (Author), Mertens, U. (Author), Rohlfing, K. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley and Sons Inc 2021
• Subjects: child; Child; Child, Preschool; cognition; Cognition; Cognitive abilities; Development; gesture; Gesture; Gestures; human; Humans; language; Language; preschool child; semantics; Semantics; speech; Speech
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co-verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual-spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON-R (Formula presented.) test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. © 2021 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).