Narrative Abilities at Age 3 Are Associated Positively With Gesture Accuracy but Negatively With Gesture Rate.

PURPOSE: Though the frequency of gesture use by infants has been related to the development of different language abilities in the initial stages of language acquisition, less is known about whether this frequency (or "gesture rate") continues to correlate with language measures in later stages of language acquisition, or whether the relation to language skills also depends on the accuracy with which such gestures are produced (or reproduced). This study sets out to explore whether preschoolers' narrative abilities are related to these two variables, namely, gesture rate and gesture accuracy. METHOD: A total of 31 typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children participated in a multimodal imitation task, a context-based gesture elicitation task, and a narrative retelling task. RESULTS: Results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the children's narrative scores and their gesture accuracy scores, whereas higher rates of gesture use did not correlate with higher levels of narrative skill. Further multimodal regression analysis confirmed that gesture accuracy was a positive predictor of narrative performance, and moreover, showed that gesture rate was a negative predictor. CONCLUSIONS: The fact that both gesture accuracy and gesture rate are strongly and differently linked to oral language abilities supports the claim that language and gesture are highly complex systems, and that complementary measures of gesture performance can help us assess with greater granularity the relationship between gesture and language development. These findings highlight the need to use gesture during clinical assessments as an informative indicator of language development and suggest that future research should further investigate the value of multimodal programs in the treatment of language and communication disorders.

Narrative Performance and Sociopragmatic Abilities in Preschool Children are Linked to Multimodal Imitation Skills.

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants' early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers' ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns.

Bridging the Gap Between Prosody and Pragmatics: The Acquisition of Pragmatic Prosody in the Preschool Years and Its Relation With Theory of Mind.

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers' beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children's prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development.