A COMPARISON BETWEEN CHILDRENS AND ADULTS ABILITY TO DETECT CONCEPTUAL INFORMATION CONVEYED THROUGH REPRESENTATIONAL GESTURES

The present study compares children's and adults' ability to detect in formation that is conveyed through representational hand gestures. Eig hteen children (M = 10 years, 1 month) and 18 college undergraduates w atched videotaped stimuli of children verbally and gesturally explaini ng their reasoning in a problem-solving situation. A recall procedure was used to assess whether children and adults could detect informatio n conveyed in the stimulus children's gesture and speech. Results show ed that children and adults recalled information that was conveyed thr ough representational gestures. In addition, ''mismatching'' gesture n egatively affected the precision of speech recall for adults. However, this negative effect on speech recall was absent for children.