The aim of the present study was to examine the use of gestures in the narrative productions of preschool children. Both the developmental patterns of gestures and verbal production and the relationships between them were analysed. The participants included 45 preschool children, aged 38 to 71 months. The narrative competence of each child was assessed individually using a new storybook narrative task (the Narrative Competence Task ). Each child’s performance was videotaped to assess both verbal and gestural productions. The results showed that the syntactic complexity and lexical variety in the children’s narratives increased with increasing age, whereas the number of gestures significantly decreased. Moreover, the number of gestures was positively associated with the proportion of utterances without verbs and negatively correlated with the proportion of complex utterances. Therefore, we could hypothesise that gestures can be used as a support in narrative construction by those children who are less proficient in syntactic skills.

中文翻译：

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学龄前儿童叙事中的手势产生

本研究的目的是检查手势在学龄前儿童叙事作品中的使用。分析了手势和语言产生的发展模式以及它们之间的关系。参与者包括 45 名年龄在 38 至 71 个月之间的学龄前儿童。使用新的故事书叙事任务（叙事能力任务）单独评估每个孩子的叙事能力。每个孩子的表现都被录像，以评估口头和手势的表现。结果表明，儿童叙事的句法复杂度和词汇多样性随着年龄的增长而增加，而手势的数量则显着减少。而且，手势次数与不带动词的话语比例呈正相关，与复杂话语比例呈负相关。因此，我们可以假设，那些不精通句法技能的孩子可以使用手势作为叙事构建的支持。