The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge

This study investigates two implications offrequent mismatches between gesture and speech in a child’s explanations of a concept: (I) Do gesture/speech mis-matches reflect a basic inconsistency in the explanatory system which underlies a child’s understanding of a concept? (2) Do gesturelspeech mismatches, per-haps as a consequence of this inconsistency, reflect a heightened receptivity to instruction in that concept? The Piagetian conservation task, which asks children to explain their judg-ments about quantity invariance, was used to test these hypotheses. Children ages 5-8 were asked to make six conservation judgments and then to explain each of those judgments. All but one of the children were found to gesture spontaneously with their spoken explanations. Children were classified into two groups according to the relationship between gesture and speech in their explanations: “Discordant ” children produced many explanations in which the information conveyed in speech did not match the information conveyed in gesture; “concordant ” children produced few such mismatched explanations. Study I sought to determine whether discordant children were less consistent in the reasoning underlying their verbal explanations of quantity invariance than were concordant children. Two indices of consistency that were indepen-dent of the discordance classifications were devised and applied to the perfor-mances of 28 children on the six conservation tasks. The discordant children were found to have significantly lower scores on both indices of consistency than the concordant children. Thus, children who frequently produced mismat