Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Dev Sci. 2020 Nov;23(6):e12967. doi: 10.1111/desc.12967. Epub 2020 Apr 15.
Gesture is an integral part of language development. While recent evidence shows that observing a speaker who is simultaneously producing beat gestures helps preschoolers remember and understand information and also improves the production of oral narratives, little is known about the potential value of encouraging children to produce beat gestures-as opposed to merely observing them. In this between-subjects pretest-posttest training study we examine whether encouraging children to produce beats can boost their narrative performance. A total of 47 5- to 6-year-old children were divided into two groups and exposed to a training session in which a total of six stories were presented under one of two experimental conditions: (a) the children merely observed video-recordings of a storyteller who used beat gestures and were then asked to retell the narratives; or (b) the children observed the same video-recordings and then retold the narratives but were encouraged to simultaneously use their hands in the same way the storytellers did. Pretests and posttests consisting of children's narrations of short animated cartoons were analysed for narrative structure and fluency. A comparison of scores showed that children in the group that had been encouraged to use beat gestures in the training phase performed better in both narrative structure and fluency than the group of children who were simply asked to retell the story without gesture instruction. These findings suggest that linguistically relevant body movements serve to boost language development and that embodied storytelling can be of help in narrative training.
手势是语言发展的一个组成部分。虽然最近的证据表明，同时观察一个正在打拍子的说话者可以帮助学龄前儿童记住和理解信息，并提高口头叙述的产生，但对于鼓励儿童打拍子（而不仅仅是观察他们）的潜在价值知之甚少。在这项被试间的前测-后测训练研究中，我们研究了鼓励儿童打拍子是否可以提高他们的叙述表现。共有 47 名 5 至 6 岁的儿童被分为两组，并接受了一个训练课程，在这个课程中，总共六个故事在两种实验条件下的一个视频记录中呈现：（a）儿童仅观察使用打拍子手势的讲故事者的视频记录，然后要求他们复述这些叙述；或（b）儿童观察相同的视频记录，然后复述这些叙述，但被鼓励以与讲故事者相同的方式同时用手打拍子。对由儿童讲述简短动画片组成的前测和后测进行了叙述结构和流畅性的分析。对分数的比较表明，在训练阶段被鼓励使用打拍子手势的儿童在叙述结构和流畅性方面的表现均优于没有手势指导仅被要求复述故事的儿童组。这些发现表明，与语言相关的身体运动有助于促进语言发展，而身体叙述可以在叙述训练中提供帮助。
