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Abstract:
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There is consensus evidence that gestures and prosody are important precursors of children’s early language abilities and development. Previous literature has investigated the beneficial role of beat gestures in the recall of information by preschoolers (Igualada, Esteve-Gibert, & Prieto, under review; Austin & Sweller, 2014). However, to our knowledge, little is known about whether the use of beat gestures can promote children’s later linguistic abilities and specifically whether training with beat gestures can boost children’s narrative skills in a narrative discourse./nForty-seven five and six-year-old children, three of whom were excluded from the analysis, participated in a between-subject training study with a pretest and posttest design (i.e. children were presented with two wordless cartoons in each test). They were exposed to a training phase which contained a total of six stories, presented under two between-subject experimental conditions: 1) No-Beat condition, e.g., narratives performed with prosodic prominence and no beat gestures in target positions; and 2) Beat condition, e.g., narratives performed with prosodic prominence and beat gestures in target positions within the story. Results demonstrated that children who undertook the Beat training condition showed a higher gain in the quality of their posttest narratives of wordless cartoons; that is, better narrative structure scores, better fluency scores, and more co-speech gestures performance. Therefore, there is evidence that a short training with beat gestures has positive effects on the development of children’s/nnarrative discourse abilities. |
