Date created: 2019-03-28 07:35 PM | Last Updated: 2020-02-04 03:45 PM

Category: Project

Description: We investigated monolingual and bilingual pre-schoolers’ (N = 80) ability to understand others’ iconic gestures (gesture perception) and produce intelligible iconic gestures themselves (gesture production). Furthermore, we explored differences in parental iconic gesture frequency between the two language groups. In children’s gesture perception task, the experimenter replaced the last word of every sentence with an iconic gesture. The child then was asked to choose one of four pictures that would match the gesture as well as the sentence. In the gesture production task, children meet a deaf puppet and were asked to indicate “with their hands” which objects the puppet should give them next. Finally, parental gesture frequency was observed during speech. No difference between monolingual and bilingual children in iconic gesture perception was found. In contrast, bilinguals produced more intelligible gestures than their monolingual peers. Additionally, bilingual children’s parents gestured more during speech than parents of monolinguals. We suggest that bilinguals heightened sensitivity to their interaction partner supports their ability to produce intelligible gestures and results in a bilingual advantage in iconic gesture production.