Children improve their narrative performance with the help of rhythmic gestures

These results show that encouraging children to use rhythmic gestures while narrating a story helps to improve the quality of their narrations and, consequently, their oral skills. The study suggests that body movements are linguistically relevant because they play an important role in the development of language. In short, a multimodal training where children narrate stories using rhythmic gestures can help improve their oral narrative skills.

Credit: Ingrid Vilà-Giménez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)Pilar Prieto (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra)