Konuşma sırasında yetişkinler ve çocuklar tarafından kullanılan mimiklerin mekansal anlatımlar sırasında hafızadaki rolleri

Do gestures play a role in keeping spatial information in memory during speaking? The present thesis aims to find out whether gestures those speakers spontaneously use while speaking plays a role in memory maintenance for children and whether and how this changes when compared to adults. 28 adults and 25 five-year-old child participants were asked to watch simple motion events shown to them on a laptop. They were then asked to retell what they had seen to an adult listener in 3 conditions; when the still pictures of the objects they were describing (1) were not visible on the screen anymore (2) were visible only to them but not the listener and (3) were visible to both themselves and to the listener. If children use gestures to keep spatial images in memory more than adults I expected them to use more iconic gestures per word when the objects they are describing are not visible (conditions 2 and 3) than when they are visible (condition 1). However my results did not support this hypothesis. I did find neither speech nor the iconic gestures per word to be different across conditions in both adults and children. Thus the memory maintenance function of gesture might not be a primary function of gesture. Instead our findings indicated other functions of gestures similar and different between adults and children in spatial descriptions. Both groups used more points to entities when they were available to both the speaker and the addressee than other situations, indicating children understood communicative situation as adults did. Finally adults used more gestures than children indicating that gestures may be used to organize complex spatial information during speech.Keywords: Functions of gestures, memory maintenance, spatial information, iconic gestures, deictic gestures, children, adults