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

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.

Progressive Reduction of Iconic Gestures Contributes to School-Aged Children's Increased Word Production.

The economic principle of communication, according to which successful communication can be reached by least effort, has been studied for verbal communication. With respect to nonverbal behavior, it implies that forms of iconic gestures change over the course of communication and become reduced in the sense of less pronounced. These changes and their effects on learning are currently unexplored in relevant literature.

Children's Narrative Elaboration After Reading a Storybook Versus Viewing a Video.

Previous studies have found that narrative input conveyed through different media influences the structure and content of children's narrative retellings. Visual, televised narratives appear to elicit richer and more detailed narratives than traditional, orally transmitted storybook media. To extend this prior work and drawing from research on narrative elaboration, the current study's main goal was to identify the core plot component differences (the , , , , , and of a story) between children's retellings of televised versus traditional storybook narratives.