Do gestures reflect children’s lexical retrieval difficulties?

According to the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis, one important function of representational gestures is to help speakers retrieve words for production. In this study, we test whether gestures help preschoolers access words for production. We tested two predictions generated from the LRH. First, since bilinguals often have greater difficulties with lexical access than monolinguals, we predicted that bilinguals will gesture more than monolinguals. Second, since low-frequency words are harder to access than high frequency words, we predicted that the more low-frequency words children used, the more they would gesture. Using children’s (aged 4 to 6 years) data from a storytelling task, we found no difference in gesture use between bilinguals and monolinguals. We did, however, find that the use of low-frequency words was a positive predictor of gesture use. While this result could support the LRH, an exploration of some examples of gesture production raises some doubts about that conclusion.