When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co-verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual-spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON-R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities.

中文翻译：

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认知能力与 4 岁儿童语言和手势语义特征分布的关系

当年幼的孩子学习使用语言时，他们开始用双手做共同语言的手势。然而，儿童之间存在相当大的差异，尚不完全了解这些个体差异的原因。我们研究了 4 岁儿童如何使用言语和标志性手势来传达不同类型空间事件描述中的含义，以及这与他们的认知能力有何关系。专注于动作的自发说明，我们应用语义特征 (SF) 分析来表征语音和手势含义的组合，并将它们与儿童的视觉空间能力或抽象/具体推理能力（使用标准化的 SON-R 测量）相关联测试）。结果表明，认知能力较高的儿童通过手势传达的意义明显更多，而不仅仅是通过言语传达。这些发现表明，幼儿使用 cospeech 表征手势与他们的心理表征和推理能力呈正相关。