Encouraging kids to beat: children's beat gesture production boosts their narrative performance

Gesture is an integral part of language development. While recent evidence shows that observing a speaker who is simultaneously producing beat gestures helps preschoolers remember and understand information and also improves the production of oral narratives, little is known about the potential value of encouraging children to produce beat gestures—as opposed to merely observing them. In this between‐subjects pretest–posttest training study we examine whether encouraging children to produce beats can boost their narrative performance. A total of 47 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children were divided into two groups and exposed to a training session in which a total of six stories were presented under one of two experimental conditions: (a) the children merely observed video‐recordings of a storyteller who used beat gestures and were then asked to retell the narratives; or (b) the children observed the same video‐recordings and then retold the narratives but were encouraged to simultaneously use their hands in the same way the storytellers did. Pretests and posttests consisting of children's narrations of short animated cartoons were analysed for narrative structure and fluency. A comparison of scores showed that children in the group that had been encouraged to use beat gestures in the training phase performed better in both narrative structure and fluency than the group of children who were simply asked to retell the story without gesture instruction. These findings suggest that linguistically relevant body movements serve to boost language development and that embodied storytelling can be of help in narrative training.This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and benefited from funding awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (PGC2018- 097007-B-100 “Multimodal Language Learning (MLL): Prosodic and Gestural Integration in Pragmatic and Phonological Development”) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR_971) to the Prosodic Studies Group. The first author also acknowledges an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (ref. 2019FI_B2_00125)