Children's gesture use provides insight into proportional reasoning strategies.

Children struggle with proportional reasoning when discrete countable information is available because they over-rely on this numerical information even when it leads to errors. In the current study, we investigated whether different types of gesture can exacerbate or mitigate these errors. Children aged 5-7 years (N = 135) were introduced to equivalent proportions using discrete gestures that highlighted separate parts, continuous gestures that highlighted continuous amounts, or no gesture.