Multimodal Development in Children's Narrative Speech: Evidence for Tight Gesture-Speech Temporal Alignment Patterns as Early as 5 Years Old

CONCLUSIONS: The results of the present study contribute to the view that both referential and non-referential gestures are aligned with pitch accentuation, and therefore, this is not only a characteristic of non-referential gestures. Our results also add support to McNeill's phonological synchronization rule from a developmental perspective and indirectly back up recent theories about the biomechanics of gesture-speech alignment, suggesting that this is an inherent ability of oral communication.PMID:36809062 | DOI:10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00451
Source: Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research