Pine Karen J, Bird Hannah, Kirk Elizabeth
School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK.
Dev Sci. 2007 Nov;10(6):747-54. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00610.x.
Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996) sees gestures as functioning more at the level of speech production in helping the speaker to find the right words. The latter hypothesis has not been fully explored with children. In this study children were given a naming task under conditions that allowed and restricted gestures. Children named more words correctly and resolved more 'tip-of-the-tongue' states when allowed to gesture than when not, suggesting that gestures facilitate access to the lexicon in children and are important for speech production as well as conceptualization.
为了解释手势在思考和言语中的作用，人们提出了两种不同的观点。信息打包假说（北田，2000）认为，在信息被编码成语言形式以便说出之前，手势对于信息的概念性打包很重要。词汇检索假说（劳舍尔、克劳斯和陈，1996）则认为，手势在言语产生层面发挥更大作用，帮助说话者找到合适的词语。后一种假说尚未在儿童中得到充分研究。在本研究中，让儿童在允许和限制手势的条件下完成命名任务。与不允许手势时相比，儿童在允许手势时能正确说出更多词语，并且解决了更多“话到嘴边”的情况，这表明手势有助于儿童获取词汇，对言语产生和概念形成都很重要。
