title: Beat gestures improve word recall in 3- to 5-year-old children.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain; Grup de Recerca en Cognició i Llenguatge (GRECIL), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 08018 Barcelona, Spain. Electronic address: alfonso.igualada@upf.edu.
authors.forename: Alfonso
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Igualada
authors.affiliation: Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain; Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Núria
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Esteve-Gibert
authors.affiliation: Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), 08010 Barcelona, Spain; Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Prieto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis
keywords: Beat gestures; Discourse; Gesture development; Gesture–speech integration; Pragmatics; Word recall