Showing how: adults across cultures use similar representational gestural strategies in demonstrations for children

Human communication often involves spontaneous teaching, a capacity central to cultural evolution, in which representational gestures (e.g. showing how to break an egg) play a crucial role in conveying semantic information. While representational gestures have been studied towards young children, less is known about how they differ for older children versus adults and their cross-cultural variation. We asked 16 Italian and 16 Dutch adults, likely to differ in their gesture use, to demonstrate two novel logic puzzles to 9–10-year-old children and to other adults. Results show that even though Italian participants produced more representational gestures overall than Dutch participants, neither group increased them for children compared to adults. However, across both cultures, two-handed representational gestures were more frequent in child-directed demonstrations. Within representational gestures, Italians used fewer bracketed gestures (gestures in which one hand remains on hold while the other moves) than Dutch participants for adults, possibly to support grounding of reference on previous information. However, both groups used bracketed gestures for children at similar rates. Overall, the findings reveal that even though cultures differ in their gesture use, similar strategies enhancing iconicity seem to be employed in demonstrations to children.