We gesture when we talk. Nonetheless, our speech is disfluent at times. The present study investigated whether ges-tures accompanying disfluencies may facilitate speech production by shortening the duration of disfluencies. FourteenEnglish-speaking adults were presented with educational videos and told to teach others after seeing these videos. Alltheir disfluencies and gestures were coded. Results reveal that disfluencies accompanied by representational gestures aresignificantly shorter as compared to if they had been accompanied by non-representational gestures or no gestures at all.There was no significant difference in duration between disfluencies accompanied by the latter two. This suggests thatrepresentational gestures may play a role in aiding speakers in the resumption of their speech. Implications for models ofhow gestures may help speech production are discussed.

Children with autism have impairments in communication and social interactions. Past studies have shown that robotbasedinterventions are effective in improving their gestural use. The present study asked whether or not children with autismcould meet the level of gestural production found in age-matched children with typical development after intervention.Four- to six-year-old children with autism in the intervention group (N = 15) took four training sessions in which theyimitated the gestures demonstrated by a social robot in various narratives. Age-matched children with autism in the wait-list control group (N = 15) and children with typical development (N = 15) received the training after the completion of theresearch. Children with autism in the intervention condition produced gestures more accurately in the training and novelstories than those in the wait-list control group in the posttests. Even more promising, the level of gestural productionaccuracy in children with autism in the delayed posttest of novel stories was comparable to that in children with typicaldevelopment, suggesting that children with autism could catch up to the level of gestural production found in children withtypical development.

Metaphors are commonly used by individuals to represent and reason about time in daily conversations. These metaphors are often paired with gestures that reveal the possible axes along which our internal conceptualisation of time may be aligned against. The present study attempts to use such gestures as temporal primes to investigate how individuals conceptualize time. Results revealed effects of congruency along the sagittal axis, but not the lateral. This suggests that individuals primarily represent time most strongly along the sagittal axis. Implications for models of how individuals represent time as well as methods of investigating how time is represented in the mind are discussed.