Integration of speech and cohesive use of space in gesture

The number of studies on comprehension of gestures and speech has increased recently. However, it is not understood at what age children can integrate information from speech and gesture at the discourse level. Thus, this study examined how well 5-, 6-, 10-year-olds and adults integrated information from spoken discourse and the cohesive use of space in gesture, in comprehension. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a combination of spoken discourse and a sequence of gestures, and selected an interpretation of the final sentence that best matched the preceding spoken and gestural contexts. The final sentence was ambiguous, but it was disambiguated by the cohesive use of space in gesture. We found that adult listeners could successfully integrate spoken and gestural contexts to derive the correct interpretation, but it was difficult for 5-year-olds to do so. This suggests that children aged six and over can use the location information assigned by gesture to disambiguate a semantically underspecified sentence, and integrate information from spoken discourse and cohesive gestures. In Experiment 2, only 5-year-olds participated. They were presented with a combination of spoken discourse and a sequence of paper dolls, instead of gestures, in the same manner as Experiment 1. The result showed that 5-year-olds could successfully integrate the spoken and paper doll contexts. This indicates that 5-year-olds can associate the referent with the location indicated by the concrete visual image, and integrate information from the visual image and that from speech to disambiguate a semantically underspecified sentence. However, they could not do so when the visual stimulus provided an extremely schematic representation, namely a gesture indicating a location in gesture space. From these results, we concluded that speech-gesture integration gradually develops in early childhoo