Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Silent gesture provides a unique window into how humans map meaning onto the body without speech. While prior
work has identified cross-linguistic regularities in iconic strategies (Ortega & Özyürek, 2019a, b), the role of age in
shaping these mappings remains unclear. Here, we test whether age predicts the selection of iconic strategies (acting,
drawing, representing, personification) in European Spanish. Thirty monolingual participants (n = 10 per group) from
three age groups (3-5; 19-22; 51-58) produced gestures for 42 stimuli across five semantic categories. Coding reliability
was assessed on a subset of the data (≈91% agreement). Results show robust age-related differences in both gesture
complexity and strategy choice (ps < .001). Multinomial regression further indicates that categorical age group and
semantic category jointly predict gesture technique (R² = .32, p < .001). These findings suggest developmental and/or
cohort-related shifts in how meaning is iconically represented across the lifespan