KNOWLEDGE CONVEYED IN GESTURE IS NOT TIED TO THE HANDS

Children frequently gesture when they explain what they know, and thei r gestures sometimes convey different information than their speech do es. in this study, we investigate whether children's gestures convey k nowledge that the children themselves can recognize in another context . We asked fourth-grade children to explain their solutions to a set o f math problems and identified the solution procedures each child conv eyed only in gesture (and not in speech) during the explanations. We t hen examined whether those procedures could be accessed by the same ch ild on a rating task that did not involve gesture at all. Children rat ed solutions derived from procedures they conveyed uniquely in gesture higher than solutions derived from procedures they did not convey at all. Thus, gesture is indeed a vehicle through which children express their knowledge. The knowledge children express uniquely in gesture is accessible on other tasks, and in this sense, is not tied to the hand s.