Gesture and speech combinations beyond two-word stage in an experimental task

Gestures and speech combinations have a crucial role on early lexical and syntactic development. Nonetheless, little is known about the role of these combinations on language learning beyond the two-word stage. Our aim is to explore how children combine gestures and speech when they start to master syntactic rules. Thirty Spanish children (aged 24-35 months) participated in a task with a find the odd one game structure. The complexity of the target picture increased in terms of the relationships between the elements depicted in each image. Children coordinate gestures and words preferably as their main communicative resource, regardless the complexity of the message to convey or their linguistic development. They distribute the semantic load between speech and gesture depending on message complexity. Among all types of gesture-speech combinations produced, reinforcing combinations were related to lexical and syntactic development, and supplementary combinations were related to lexical development.