Elizabeth Kirk

A microgenetic analysis of the relationship between speech and gesture in children: Evidence for semantic and temporal asynchrony

We present a microgenetic analysis of the gestures that children produce as they talk about a balance task. Children gesture spontaneously on this task and here their hand gestures are considered in relation to the accompanying speech. By close examination of 21 childrens single sessions, and the 163 iconic gestures they produced (a mean of 7.6 gestures per child), it was found that gestures are rarely produced without speech. However, one third of the gestures the children produced conveyed different information to that expressed in their spoken explanations. Furthermore, children were found to convey information uniquely in gesture by expressing ideas in the manual modality that did not appear in their spoken explanations. Finally, in many cases children expressed an idea in gesture before they talked about it. These data suggest that gestures are integrally linked to the childs thinking and are an important and illuminating means of externalising cognition.

I hear what you say but I see what you mean: The role of gestures in children's pragmatic comprehension

This study investigated whether gesture can enhance the pragmatic comprehension of language impaired children. Language impaired children (N=21) and age matched typically developing children (N=26) were presented verbal scenarios in two conditions: speech only and speech+gesture. In the speech+gesture condition, speech was accompanied by iconic gestures which conveyed relevant semantic information complimentary to the spoken message. Children were asked questions about each scenario that required them to make inferences beyond what was explicitly stated. All children answered more questions correctly when verbal scenarios were accompanied by gesture, however, this difference was only significant for language impaired children. To examine whether children integrated the information conveyed by gesture into their representation of the spoken message, we analysed the gestures children produced as they answered the questions. Children gestured more when they were verbalising correct inferences than incorrect ones. Furthermore, children, especially those with specific language impairment, produced the same gestures that they observed and were more likely to do so in correct rather than incorrect answers. Gestures make a crucial contribution to an utterances meaning, helping children, especially those with a language impairment to understand speech that requires meaning to be inferred.

Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking:

Gestures help people think and can help problem solvers generate new ideas. We conducted two experiments exploring the self-oriented function of gesture in a novel domain: creative thinking. In Experiment 1, we explored the relationship between children’s spontaneous gesture production and their ability to generate novel uses for everyday items (alternative-uses task). There was a significant correlation between children’s creative fluency and their gesture production, and the majority of children’s gestures depicted an action on the target object. Restricting children from gesturing did not significantly reduce their fluency, however. In Experiment 2, we encouraged children to gesture, and this significantly boosted their generation of creative ideas. These findings demonstrate that gestures serve an important self-oriented function and can assist creative thinking.

The Mindedness of Maternal Touch: An Investigation of Maternal Mind-Mindedness and Mother-Infant Touch Interactions

Increasing evidence shows that maternal touch may promote emotion regulation in infants, however less is known about how parental higher-order social cognition abilities are translated into tactile, affect-regulatory behaviours towards their infants. During 10 min book-reading, mother-infant sessions when infants were 12 months old (N = 45), we investigated maternal mind-mindedness (MM), the social cognitive ability to understand an infant’s mental state, by coding the contingency of maternal verbal statements towards the infants’ needs and desires. We also rated spontaneous tactile interactions in terms of their emotional contingency. We found that frequent non-attuned mind-related comments were associated with touch behaviours that were not contingent with the infant’s emotions; ultimately discouraging affective tactile responses from the infant. However, comments that were more appropriate to infant’s mental states did not necessarily predict more emotionally-contingent tactile behaviours. These findings suggest that when parental high-order social cognitive abilities are compromised, they are also likely to translate into inappropriate, tactile attempts to regulate infant’s emotions.