Previous studies have shown that bilingual adults use more gestures than English monolinguals. Because no study has compared
the gestures of bilinguals and monolinguals in both languages, the high gesture rate could be due to transfer from a high
gesture language or could result from the use of gesture to aid in linguistic access. In this study we tried to distinguish
between those causes by comparing the gesture rate of 10 French–English bilingual preschoolers with both 10 French and 10
English monolinguals. All were between 4 and 6 years of age. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and tell the story
back. The results showed the bilingual children gestured more than either group of monolinguals and at the same rate in both
French and English. These results suggest that that the bilinguals were not gesturing because they were transferring the high
gesture rate from one language to another. We argue that bilinguals might gesture more than monolinguals to help formulate
their spoken message.
Keywords Gestures - Speech production - Cross-linguistic transfer - Bilingualism - Bilingual first language acquisition - Preschoolers