Article published In:
GestureVol. 22:1 (2023) ► pp.94–114
Do gestures reflect children’s lexical retrieval difficulties?
Evidence from bilingual and monolingual preschoolers
According to the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis, one important function of representational gestures is to help
speakers retrieve words for production. In this study, we test whether gestures help preschoolers access words for production. We
tested two predictions generated from the LRH. First, since bilinguals often have greater difficulties with lexical access than
monolinguals, we predicted that bilinguals will gesture more than monolinguals. Second, since low-frequency words are harder to
access than high frequency words, we predicted that the more low-frequency words children used, the more they would gesture. Using
children’s (aged 4 to 6 years) data from a storytelling task, we found no difference in gesture use between bilinguals and
monolinguals. We did, however, find that the use of low-frequency words was a positive predictor of gesture use. While this result
could support the LRH, an exploration of some examples of gesture production raises some doubts about that conclusion.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Bilingualism and representational gesture use
- Word characteristics and representational gesture use
- This study
- Method
- Materials
- Procedure
- Transcription and coding
- Results
- Some examples of representational gestures and accompanying speech
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (70)
References
Adorni, R., Manfredi, M., & Proverbio, A. M. (2013). Since
when or how often? dissociating the roles of age of acquisition (AoA) and lexical frequency in early visual word
processing. Brain and
Language,
124
(1), 132–141. 

Alibali, M. W., Kita, S., & Young, A. J. (2000). Gesture
and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture. Language and Cognitive
Processes,
15
(6), 593–613. 

Arslan, B., Aktan-Erciyes, A., & Göksun, T. (2023). Multimodal
language in bilingual and monolingual children: Gesture production and speech
disfluency. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition, 1–13. 

Azar, Z., Backus, A., & Özyürek, A. (2020). Language
contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain language specific gesture patterns in each
language. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition,
23
(2), 414–428. 

Beattie, G. & Coughlan, J. (1999). An
experimental investigation of the role of iconic gestures in lexical access using the tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon. British Journal of
Psychology,
90
(1), 35–56. 

Beattie, G. & Shovelton, H. (2000). Iconic
hand gestures and the predictability of words in context in spontaneous speech. British Journal
of
Psychology,
91
(4), 473–491. 

Bello, A., Capirci, O., & Volterra, V. (2004). Lexical
production in children with Williams syndrome: Spontaneous use of gesture in a naming
task. Neuropsychologia,
42
(2), 201–213. 

Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism:
The good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition,
12
(1), 3–11. 

Brown-Schmidt, S. & Tanenhaus, M. (2006). Watching
the eyes when talking about size: An investigation of message formulation and utterance
planning. Journal of Memory and
Language,
54
1, 592–609. 

Butterworth, B. & Hadar, U. (1989). Gesture,
speech, and computational stages: A reply to McNeill. Psychological
Review,
96
1, 168–174. 

Colletta, J. M., Guidetti, M., Capirci, O., Cristilli, C., Demir, O. E., Kunene-Nicolas, R. N., & Levine, S. (2015). Effects
of age and language on co-speech gesture production: an investigation of French, American, and Italian children’s
narratives. Journal of Child
Language,
42
(1), 122–145. 

Colletta, J. M., Pellenq, C., & Guidetti, M. (2010). Age-related
changes in co-speech gesture and narrative: Evidence from French children and adults. Speech
Communication,
52
(6), 565–576. 

Cook, S. W. & Fenn, K. M. (2017). The
function of gesture in learning and memory. In R. B. Church, M. W. Alibali, & S. D. Kelly (Eds.), Why
gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and
communicating (pp. 129–153). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Daley, L., Gokhman, E., Pechey, C., & Nicoladis, E. (in
press). Predicting gesture use among bilingual and monolingual
children. In A. Brown and S. Eskildsen (Eds.), Multimodality
across Epistemologies in Second Language
Research. London: Routledge.
Degani, T., Kreiser, V., & Novogrodsky, R. (2019). The
joint effects of bilingualism, DLD and item frequency on children’s lexical-retrieval
performance. International Journal of Language & Communication
Disorders,
54
(3), 485–498. 

Dunn, L. M. & Dunn, L. M. (1997). Examiner’s
manual for the PPVT–III: Peabody picture vocabulary test–third Edition. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
Feyereisen, P. (2006). How
could gesture facilitate lexical access?. Advances in Speech Language
Pathology,
8
(2), 128–133. 

Fraundorf, S. H. & Watson, D. G. (2014). Alice’s
adventures in um-derland: Psycholinguistic sources of variation in disfluency
production. Language, Cognition and
Neuroscience
29
1, 1083–1096. 

Frick-Horbury, D., & Guttentag, R. E. (1998). The
effects of restricting hand gesture production on lexical retrieval and free recall. The
American Journal of
Psychology,
111
(1), 43–62. 

Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More
use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links
hypothesis. Journal of Memory and
Language,
58
(3), 787–814. 

Ha, J. W. & Sim, H. S. (2011). The
relationship between lexical retrieval and coverbal gestures. Korean Journal of Cognitive
Science,
22
(2), 123–143. 

Hoetjes, M., Krahmer, E., & Swerts, M. (2015). On
what happens in gesture when communication is unsuccessful. Speech
Communication,
72
1, 160–175. 

Holler, J., Turner, K., & Varcianna, T. (2013). It’s
on the tip of my fingers: Co-speech gestures during lexical retrieval in different social
contexts. Language and Cognitive
Processes,
28
(10), 1509–1518. 

Hostetter, A. B. & Alibali, M. W. (2019). Gesture
as simulated action: Revisiting the framework. Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review,
26
1, 721–752. 

Ivanova, I. & Costa, A. (2008). Does
bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production?. Acta
Psychologica,
127
(2), 277–288. 

Kastenbaum, J. G., Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Sheng, L., Mavis, I., Sebastian-Vaytadden, R., Rangamani, G., Vallila-Rohter, S., & Kiran, S. (2019). The
influence of proficiency and language combination on bilingual lexical access. Bilingualism:
Language and
Cognition,
22
(2), 300–330. 

Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture:
Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Kidd, E. & Holler, J. (2009). Children’s
use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity. Developmental
Science,
12
1, 903–913. 

Kısa, Y. D., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Casasanto, D. (2022). Do
gestures really facilitate speech production?. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General,
151
(6), 1252–1271. 

Krauss, R. M., Chen, Y., & Chawla, P. (1996). Nonverbal
behavior and nonverbal communication: What do conversational hand gestures tell
us? In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances
in experimental social
psychology, Volume 281 (pp. 389–450). San Diego: Academic Press.
Krönke, K. M., Mueller, K., Friederici, A. D., & Obrig, H. (2013). Learning
by doing? The effect of gestures on implicit retrieval of newly acquired
words. Cortex,
49
(9), 2553–2568. 

Lakin, J. L., Jefferis, V. E., Cheng, C. M., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). The
chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious
mimicry. Journal of Nonverbal
Behavior,
27
(3), 145–162. 

Laurent, A. & Nicoladis, E. (2015). Gesture
restriction affects French–English bilinguals’ speech only in French. Bilingualism: Language
and
cognition,
18
(2), 340–349. 

Li, P. & Shirai, Y. (2000). The
acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The
CHILDES project (3rd edn.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1990). Activation,
competition, and frequency in lexical access. In G. T. M. Altmann (Ed.), Cognitive
models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational
perspectives (pp. 148–172). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
McNeill, D. (1985). So
you think gestures are nonverbal? Psychological
Review,
92
(3), 350–371. 

Morsella, E. & Krauss, R. M. (2004). The
role of gestures in spatial working memory and speech. The American Journal of
Psychology,
117
(3), 411–424. 

Nicoladis, E. & Jiang, Z. (2018). Language
and cognitive predictors of lexical selection in storytelling for monolingual and sequential bilingual
children. Journal of Cognition and
Development,
19
(4), 413–430. 

Nicoladis, E., Nagpal, J., Marentette, P., & Hauer, B. (2018). Gesture
frequency is linked to story-telling style: evidence from bilinguals. Language and
Cognition,
10
(4), 641–664. 

Nicoladis, E., Pika, S., & Marentette, P. (2009). Do
French–English bilingual children gesture more than monolingual children? Journal of
Psycholinguistic
Research,
38
(6), 573–585. 

Nicoladis, E. & Wiebe, S. A. (2020). How
to use a wide variety of words in telling a story with a small vocabulary: cognitive predictors of lexical selection for
simultaneous bilingual children. Language, Cognition and
Neuroscience,
35
(3), 330–338. 

Novack, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2015). Learning
from gesture: How our hands change our minds. Educational Psychology
Review,
27
(3), 405–412. 

Papesh, M. H. & Goldinger, S. D. (2012). Pupil-BLAH-metry:
Cognitive effort in speech planning reflected by pupil dilation. Attention, Perception, &
Psychophysics,
74
1, 754–765. 

Pika, S., Nicoladis, E., & Marentette, P. F. (2006). A
cross-cultural study on the use of gestures: Evidence for cross-linguistic
transfer? Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition,
9
(3), 319–327. 

Pine, K. J., Bird, H., & Kirk, E. (2007). The
effects of prohibiting gestures on children’s lexical retrieval ability. Developmental
Science,
10
(6), 747–754. 

Ping, R. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). Gesturing
saves cognitive resources when talking about nonpresent objects. Cognitive
Science,
34
(4), 602–619. 

Poulin-Dubois, D., Bialystok, E., Blaye, A., Polonia, A., & Yott, J. (2013). Lexical
access and vocabulary development in very young bilinguals. International Journal of
Bilingualism,
17
(1), 57–70. 

Pyers, J. E., Magid, R., Gollan, T. H., & Emmorey, K. (2021). Gesture
helps, only if you need it: Inhibiting gesture reduces Tip-of-the-Tongue resolution for those with weak Short-Term
memory. Cognitive
Science,
45
(1), e12914-n/a. 

Rauscher, F. H., Krauss, R. M. & Chen, Y. (1996). Gesture,
speech and lexical access. Psychological
Science,
7
(4), 226–230. 

Raymer, A., Singletary, F., Rodriguez, A., Ciampitti, M., Heilman, K., & Rothi, L. (2006). Effects
of gesture verbal treatment for noun and verb retrieval in aphasia. Journal of the
International Neuropsychological
Society,
12
1, 867–882. 

Rochanavibhata, S. & Marian, V. (2021). Cross-cultural
differences in mother-preschooler book sharing practices in the United States and
Thailand. Journal of Child
Language,
48
(4), 834–857. 

Segalowitz, S. J. & Lane, K. C. (2000). Lexical
access of function versus content words. Brain and
Language,
75
(3), 376–389. 

Segui, J., Mehler, J., Frauenfelder, U., & Morton, J. (1982). The
word frequency effect and lexical
access. Neuropsychologia,
20
(6), 615–627. 

Smithson, L. & Nicoladis, E. (2013). Verbal
memory resources predict iconic gesture use among monolinguals and bilinguals. Bilingualism:
Language and
Cognition,
16
(4), 934–944. 

So, W. C. (2010). Cross-cultural
transfer in gesture frequency in Chinese–English bilinguals. Language and Cognitive
Processes,
25
(10), 1335–1353. 

Stam, G. (2001). Lexical
failure and gesture in second language development. In C. Cavé, I. Guaïtella, & S. Santi (Eds.), Oralité
et gestualité: interactions et comportements multimodaux dans la
communication (pp. 271–275). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Sullivan, M. D., Poarch, G. J., & Bialystok, E. (2018). Why
is lexical retrieval slower for bilinguals? Evidence from picture naming. Bilingualism:
Language and
Cognition,
21
(3), 479–488. 

Swets, B., Jacovina, M. E., & Gerrig, R. J. (2013). Effects
of conversational pressures on speech planning. Discourse
Processes,
50
(1), 23–51. 

Thordardottir, E. (2011). The
relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development. International Journal of
Bilingualism,
15
(4), 426–445. 

Treffner, P., Peter, M., & Kleidon, M. (2008). Gestures
and phases: The dynamics of speech-hand communication. Ecological
Psychology,
20
(1), 32–64. 

Ünsal, Z., Jakobson, B., Wickman, P. O., & Molander, B. O. (2018). Gesticulating
science: Emergent bilingual students’ use of gestures. Journal of Research in Science
Teaching,
55
(1), 121–144. 

Wermelinger, S., Gampe, A., Helbling, N., & Daum, M. M. (2020). Do
you understand what I want to tell you? Early sensitivity in bilinguals’ iconic gesture perception and
production. Developmental
Science,
23
(5), e12943. 

Yan, S. & Nicoladis, E. (2009). Finding
le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children’s lexical access in comprehension and
production. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition,
12
(3), 323–335. 

Zvaigzne, M., Oshima-Takane, Y., & Hirakawa, M. (2019). How
does language proficiency affect children’s iconic gesture use? Applied
Psycholinguistics,
40
1, 555–583. 

Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Tian, Mengxin
2024.
An Analysis of the Efficacy of L2-MT Mixed Modeling in Second Language Acquisition - A Cognitive Ability Perspective.
Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences 9:1

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.