2026/07/01 by Kazuki Sekine, Takumi Yamaguchi
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Hearing Impairment and Communication #Hemispheric Asymmetry in Neuroscience #Language Development and Disorders
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2026.101756
openalex publication_date 2026/07/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
This study examined whether spontaneous gestures enhance memory for spoken content and whether gesture information is retained accurately in memory across developmental stages. We focused on iconic gestures that depict perceptual or motoric aspects of a referent (McNeill, 1992). Children aged seven, eight, and nine years, as well as adults, participated in a memory task in which gestures and speech were either semantically congruent or incongruent. Participants were later asked to recall both the verbal content and the meaning of the gestures. The results revealed that recall accuracy for verbal content was significantly higher when gestures were present compared to when they were absent. Furthermore, in adults and nine-year-olds, congruent gesture-speech pairings led to higher recall accuracy than incongruent ones, while younger children did not show this effect. This suggests that the ability to benefit from semantically aligned gestures in verbal memory emerges around the age of nine. Regarding gesture memory, accuracy was higher when participants had retrieved the accompanying verbal content, suggesting that verbal retrieval can facilitate subsequent access to gesture information. These results suggest that gesture and speech may be stored in an integrated manner in memory. No significant age differences were found in gesture recall accuracy, possibly due to methodological constraints. Overall, the results support the view that gestures contribute to memory by providing redundant semantic information that enhances comprehension and retrieval, with developmental improvements in integration efficiency. These findings have implications for educational contexts, suggesting that congruent gestures may support memory and learning, especially from middle childhood onwards.