Gesture production in the narratives of preschool children

The aim of the present study was to examine the use of gestures in the narrative productions of preschool children. Both the developmental patterns of and the relationships between gestures and verbal production were analysed. The participants included 45 preschool children, aged 38 to 71 months. The narrative competence of each child was assessed individually using a new storybook narrative task (the “Narrative Competence Task”). Each child’s performance was videotaped to assess both verbal and gestural productions. The results showed that the syntactic complexity and lexical variety in the children’s narratives increased with increasing age, whereas the number of gestures significantly decreased. Moreover, the number of gestures was positively associated with the proportion of utterances without verbs and negatively correlated with the proportion of complex utterances. Therefore, gestures appear to be a valuable support in narrative competence for those children who are less proficient in syntactic skills