Children Sustain Their Attention on Spatial Scenes When Planning to Describe Spatial Relations Multimodally in Speech and Gesture.

ABSTRACT: How do children allocate visual attention to scenes as they prepare to describe them multimodally in speech and co-speech gesture? In an eye-tracking study, Turkish-speaking 8-year-old children viewed four-picture displays depicting the same two objects in different spatial relations as they prepared to describe target pictures depicting left-right relations. Children's visual attention was sustained on the target picture when they were planning descriptions that expressed the spatial relation multimodally in speech and gesture, but not unimodally in speech only. This pattern persisted regardless of the semantic relation between speech and gesture (i.e., for both complementary gestures that disambiguated speech and redundant gestures that supplemented already unambiguous speech). Important

SUBMITTER: Unal E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12817325 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature