Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People use speech and gesture together when describing an event or action, where both modalities have different expressiveopportunities (Kendon, 2004). One question is how the two modalities are semantically coordinated, i.e. how meaning isdistributed across speech and accompanying gestures. While this has been studied only for adult speakers so far, here, wepresent a study on how young children (4 years of age) semantically coordinate speech and gesture, and how this relatesto their cognitive and (indirectly) their verbal skills. Results indicate significant positive correlations between cognitiveskills of the children and gesture-speech coordination. In addition, high cognitive skills correlate with the number ofsemantically relevant child descriptions revealing a link between verbal and cognitive skills.