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Updated: Oct 29, 2025

Author Spotlight: Deciphering the Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Gesture in Communication
Published on: January 26, 2024
The Relation Between Cognitive Abilities and the Distribution of Semantic Features Across Speech and Gesture in
Olga Abramov1, Friederike Kern2, Sofia Koutalidis2
1Faculty of Technology/CITEC, Bielefeld University.
Abstract:
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. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual-spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON-R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities.
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