EXPLORING THE RELATION BETWEEN GESTURE PRESENTATION PERSPECTIVE AND CHILDREN’S SPATIAL PERFORMANCE

2024-7
Orakçı, Elif
The presence of gestures with visuospatial materials enhances the children’s spatial performance. Although it is an emergent context in online educational tools, no study so far investigated whether and how the perspective of a speaker’s gesture presented to children relates to differences in spatial performance. Whether the perspective of multimodal input relates differently to 5-year-old children’s spatial performance by varying the perspective of gesture presentation in virtual visuospatial maps investigated in this study. 5-year-old monolingual Turkish children were engaged in the Directions Task. The task included visuospatial maps and videos of speakers describing routes in the map by three conditions: Speech-Gesture combination with a front-facing view, Speech-Gesture combination with an upper back angle, and Speech-only conditions with a front-facing view for control. Children were asked to verbally recall and then draw the route described to them in the videos after each trial. Children’s verbal responses were coded for the correct recall of target information in the route descriptions for spatial (e.g., behind) and location (e.g., house) information. They also engaged in perspective-taking (Frick et al., 2014), mental rotation (Frick et al., 2013), and relational thinking (Christie & Gentner, 2013) tasks. Linear mixed effect modeling regression analysis showed that children’s verbal recall, but not necessarily behavioral recall, enhanced in multimodal directions. Moreover, children’s relational reasoning and perspective-taking abilities modulate children’s verbal recall performances. The results of this study underline the importance of multimodal input and presentation perspective in enhancing children’s spatial performance.
Citation Formats
E. Orakçı, “EXPLORING THE RELATION BETWEEN GESTURE PRESENTATION PERSPECTIVE AND CHILDREN’S SPATIAL PERFORMANCE,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2024.