A Tale of Two Hands: Development of Narrative Structure in Children's Speech and Gesture and Its Relation to Later Reading Skill

Narratives are structured at a macro- and a micro-level. Coherence is macro-level organization of the narrative content, and cohesion refers to micro-level relationships between propositions. Adults structure their narratives not only in speech, but also through gestures. Despite an extensive focus on the development of narrative production in speech, children's use of gesture for narrative structure remains unexplored. Although young children have difficulty producing coherent and cohesive stories, this might not indicate a lack of conceptual understanding of narrative structure. Instead, children's speech might lag behind their conceptual understanding. When children speak, they also gesture. Children's gestures provide important information about their mental representations and predict upcoming changes in speech during transitional stages of development. The current dissertation aims to gain insight into the role of children's co-speech gestures as a window into children's conceptual understanding of narrative structure during a transitional stage of narrative development. We asked 5 to 6 years old children to retell a story from a cartoon. To examine coherence in speech, we coded whether children's narratives included main events of the cartoon story and were organized hierarchically around the internal perspectives of story characters. For cohesion in speech, we coded whether children used cohesive devices, e.g. pronouns, correctly to track referents. We also investigated coherence and cohesion in gestures. Gesture can contribute to coherence through an iconic gesture highlighting a main event expressed in speech, by depicting events from characters' internal perspective or by conveying an event that is not expressed in speech. Gesture can contribute to cohesion by displaying the same gestural feature every time a particular character is mentioned and thus keep tracking of the referent. Findings show that children use gesture to provide coherence and cohesion to their narratives. Children's use of gesture for narrative coherence reflect an underlying understanding of narrative coherence, and signal children's later ability to express narrative coherence in speech. Gesture coherence is also related to children's ability to process written discourse, i.e. reading comprehension. Children's use of gesture for cohesion is rather immature and does not reflect a conceptual understanding of narrative cohesion. The current study provides a bridge between the literature on the role of gesture during transitional stages of early language development and the literature on older children's use of gesture during transitional stages of learning. Gesture continues to be an integral part of children's communicative repertoire at later stages of language development. Moreover, gesture provides a more accurate picture of children's conceptual understanding of narrative structure than speech alone can, and signals upcoming changes in children's narrative and reading performance.