EVIDENCE OF THE INVOLVEMENT OF GESTURES IN CONCEPTUALIZATION PROCESSES IN CHILD SPEECH IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

The general aim of this research, developed by the Gestures and Cognition Studies Lab - GESTOLab, is to contribute to the study of language and cognition, seeking a better understanding of how thought and language are fundamentally linked to bodily action and are important in the teaching-learning process.

Results from different studies (McNeill, 1992; Kita, 2003; Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Pereira, 2010) corroborate the fact that the gestures of the hands are significant links between our conceptualization capacity and our linguistic skills. These gestures (deictic, iconic, metaphorical and beat gestures) are considered means to express thoughts and shapes, as well as comprehension of the world, and may present complex spatial relations, point directions and show the shape of real and imaginary objects.

The central focus of this research was to understand what role gestuality plays in conceptualization processes, planning and organization of child speech in the context of early childhood education seeking to identify the relationship between gesture and the conceptualization process in child speech in different tasks with different difficulty levels.

Our hypothesis was that, from different tasks with varying difficulty levels, we would find the incidence of different hand gestures corresponding to different mechanisms throughout the conceptualization process ̶ naming and describing purposes of familiar and unfamiliar objects.

To this end, we opted for the completion of a psycholinguistic pilot experiment in order to contribute to the research and methodologies available to us and to investigate the possibility of the hand gesture, besides its communicative function, having a role in the conceptualization, planning and organization of speech.

To enable synchronicity of speech transcripts and multimedia data analysis with emphasis on gestures we employed the EUDICO Linguistic Annotator ̶ ELAN, created by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Results and discussions presented in this paper indicate the need for continued research on the correlation between gesture and speech, namely, the role of gesture as an integral element in the cognitive processes, in addition to its importance as a possibility of access to representations of ongoing cognitive processes during learning since early childhood education.