Although research has shown that adults can benefit from the presence of beat gestures in word recall tasks, studies have failed to conclusively generalize these findings to preschool children. This study investigated whether the presence of beat gestures helps children to recall information when these gestures have the function of singling out a linguistic element in its discourse context. A total of 106 3- to 5-year-old children were asked to recall a list of words within a pragmatically child-relevant context (i.e., a storytelling activity) in which the target word was or was not accompanied by a beat gesture. Results showed that children recalled the target word significantly better when it was accompanied by a beat gesture than when it was not, indicating a local recall effect. Moreover, the recall of adjacent non-target words did not differ depending on the condition, revealing that beat gestures seem to have a strictly local highlighting function (i.e., no global recall effect). These results demonstrate that preschoolers benefit from the pragmatic contribution offered by beat gestures when they function as multimodal markers of prominence.

This research was funded by grants awarded by Recercaixa 2013–2015 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2015-66533 BFU2012-31995 “Intonational and gestural meaning in language”), by a Labex Brain and Language Research Institute (BLRI) grant (ANR-11-LABX-0036), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group.