Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech and gesture provide two different access routes to a learner's mental representation of a problem. W e examined the gestures and speech produced by children learning the concept of mathematical equivalence, and found that children on the verge of acquiring the concept tended to express information in gesture which they did not express in speech. We explored what the production of such gesture-speech mismatches implies for models of concept learning. Two models of a mechanism that produces gesture-speech mismatches were tested against data from children learning the concept of mathematical equivalence. The model which best fit the data suggests that gesture and speech draw upon a single set of representations, some of which are accessible to both gesture and speech, and some of which are accessible to gesture but not speech. Thus, gesture and speech form an integrated system in the sense that they do not draw upon two distinct sets of representations. The model implies that when new representations are acquired, they are first accessible only to gesture. Over time, they are then recoded into speech.