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Zusammenfassung:
Spatial relations (e.g., Left-Right) are challenging for children and appear at later stages of language development. However, these findings come from studies focusing on speech only. Prior work has shown that children express some concepts in gesture before speech. A study investigating descriptions of spatial layout of hidden items in a room found that 8-year-olds rarely encode the spatial location of items in speech but use gestures to convey the locations when prompted to gesture. We investigated if 8-year-olds’ spontaneous gestures express spatial relations between two items earlier than speech focusing on Left-Right relations. We found that children did not encode Left-Right relations between two entities in speech as frequently as adults did. Rather, they preferred multimodal encodings mostly using two-handed placement gestures. Our results add to the literature on gestures preceding spatial language development in children and extend previous findings to spontaneous use of gestures and Left-Right relations.
