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The Relation Between Cognitive Abilities and the Distribution of Semantic Features Across Speech and Gesture in 4‐year‐olds
Author(s) -
Abramov Olga,
Kern Friederike,
Koutalidis Sofia,
Mertens Ulrich,
Rohlfing Katharina,
Kopp Stefan
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.13012
Subject(s) - gesture , psychology , meaning (existential) , cognition , cognitive psychology , representation (politics) , mental representation , relation (database) , linguistics , computer science , database , neuroscience , philosophy , politics , political science , law , psychotherapist
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‐R2 1 2 − 7 $2\frac{1}{2}-7$ 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.