(1) Gesture-based narrative trainings using non-referential (beat) gestures

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These studies used a between-subjects training with a pretest and immediate posttest design to investigate whether narrative training with observing beat gestures as well as encouraging children to produce these gestures contribute to improving their narrative performance at posttest.

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Relevant publications:

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Vilà-Giménez, I., Igualada, A., & Prieto, P. (2019). Observing storytellers who use rhythmic beat gestures improves children’s narrative discourse performance. Developmental Psychology, 55(2), 250–262. doi: 10.1037/dev0000604

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Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2018). Encouraging children to produce rhythmic beat gestures leads to better narrative discourse performances. In K. Klessa, J. Bachan, A. Wagner, M. Karpiński, & D. Śledziński (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 704–708). Poznań, Poland. doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-143

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​Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2020). Encouraging kids to beat: Children's beat gesture production boosts their narrative performance. Developmental Science, 23(6), 1–14. doi: 10.1111/desc.12967

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(2) The cognitive effects of non-referential (beat) gestures on children's narrative discourse comprehension

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Llanes-Coromina, J., Vilà-Giménez, I., Kushch, O., Borràs-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2018). Beat gestures help preschoolers recall and comprehend discourse information. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 172(8), 168–188. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.02.004

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(3) The predictive value of non-referential (beat) gestures in children's later narrative production

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Relevant publications:

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Vilà-Giménez, I., Dowling, N., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., Prieto, P., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). The predictive value of non-referential beat gestures: Early use in parent-child interactions predicts narrative abilities at 5 years of age. Child Development, 92(6), 2335–2355. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13583

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We conducted a longitudinal study that analyzes the speech and gestures produced by 45 14- to 58-months-old children in naturalistic interactions with their caregivers. Results showed that the early spontaneous production of non-referential beat gestures, as opposed to the production of referential iconic gestures and non-referential hand flip gestures, predicts later narrative abilities at 5 years of age. We also carried out a very detailed analysis of children's target sentences with co-speech gestures (beat, flip and iconic gestures) following a pragmatic coding scheme.

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Vilà-Giménez, I., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., & Prieto, P.  (2020). The role of referential iconic and non-referential gestures in children's narrative production: Iconics signal oncoming changes in speech. Proceedings of the 7th Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN). KTH Speech, Music & Hearing and Språkbanken Tal. Stockholm, Sweden.

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The study aims to assess the predictive value of gestures in children's narrative development by comparing the effects of referential iconic gestures and non-referential gestures produced in narrative corpora. Specifically, we investigate whether referential iconic gestures and/or non-referential gestures performed by 5- to 6-year-old children while producing narratives can signal changes in children's later narrative performance two years later. Results demonstrated that referential iconics (as opposed to non-referential gestures) that accompanied narratives produced by children at 5 and 6 years of age are significant predictors of later narrative scores two years later.

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