Multimodal strategies for resolving lexical challenges: The role of situational resources and creative gestures in four- and five-year-old children

This study explores how four- and five-year-old children use gestures to creatively resolve lexical and representational challenges, and how creative gestures emerge when verbal resources are insufficient. Sixty-five German-speaking children corrected a puppet's unconventional use of a spoon with support of visual stimuli (correction task), and then described the event to a caregiver without visual stimuli (illustration task). Our quantitative analysis focused on representational gestures (deictic and iconic) and gesture size. Across tasks, results showed significantly more deictic gestures when objects were present, but no difference between tasks in iconic gestures or gesture size. Physical interaction with the spoon during the correction task facilitated children's later verbal recall of the experienced event in the illustration task, but did not affect how many gestures they produced. Gesture production was determined by the communicative situation (objects present vs. absent) rather than prior physical experience with the object. To capture children's inventive multimodal strategies, we defined creative gestures as extending beyond conventional forms to express novel, abstract, or nuanced meanings. Qualitative analysis revealed that children used gestures to substitute for missing words, emphasize meaning or animate events with body and voice. Some gestures creatively combined multiple functions or repurposed conventional forms in novel ways. These findings offer new insights into how children construct meaning when facing verbal lexical challenges. Taken together, we propose an approach for distinguishing between unconventional and enriched conventional gestures in children, aligning with research suggesting that gestures act as a cognitive tool that fosters early creativity.