How Gestures Support Children's Linguistic-Communicative and Cognitive Development

While communicating, people frequently use visual articulators, such as hand gestures, together with speech. Speech and gestures form a tightly integrated communicative system during language production and comprehension. This article focuses on two functions of gestures: (1) how gestures produced with speech facilitate communication, (2) how producing gestures or observing others' gestures facilitates learning and cognitive development. To do so, this article reviews and discusses the findings of empirical studies conducted with children of various ages who do not yet have adult like communicative and cognitive skills and hence, are more susceptible to the facilitative role of gestures. The first goal of this article was to examine to what extent and how gestures support communication skills. Prior work on vocabulary development, learning to combine words into sentences, relational language use, and problem-solving support the idea that gestures facilitate communication by allowing children to express concepts that they have developed but cannot yet express in speech. The second goal of this article was to examine to what extent and how gestures support learning and cognitive development. Studies on children's learning of relational concepts (e.g., space, events) and the development of math abilities show that using gestures and observing others' gestures not only have communicative functions but can also support learning and cognitive development. This line of work suggests that gestures facilitate learning and cognitive development by providing a tool for efficiently encoding, storing and manipulating information, guiding attention to the linguistic or conceptual information that is critical for completing a cognitive task, and encoding abstract concepts concretely. Finally, the questions that remain open in the developmental literature with regard to the facilitative role of gestures on communicative and cognitive development and suggestions for further research are discussed.