Wolfer, Pauline Baumeister, Franziska Daum, Moritz M. Dimitrova, Nevena Leone, Giada Naigles, Letitia R. Solaimani, Ehsan Durrleman, Stephanie 2025 Previous work had shown that multilingual preschool children are better at interpreting deictic gestures than their monolingual peers. The present study examines whether this multilingual effect persists beyond preschool age and whether it extends to iconic (i.e., representing the referent) and conventional (i.e., holding an arbitrary meaning) gestures. A total of N = 105 children (aged 3 to 8), varying in their balance of exposure to more than one language since birth, completed a gamified gesture comprehension task. The three gesture types were presented in four communicative conditions, namely (1) alone, with (2) reinforcing or (3) supplementing speech, compared to (4) speech produced alone. Analyses revealed that children with greater balance in their multilingual exposure understood significantly more speechless iconic gestures than children with less balanced multilingual exposure. Findings align with previous work and theoretical frameworks, indicating that multilingual exposure enhances children’s sensitivity to nonverbal communicative cues. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/333857 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/333857/files/wolfer-etal-2025a_the-impact-of-balance-of-multilingual-exposure-on-gesture-comprehension-in-children-above-preschool-age.pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/333857/files/wolfer-etal-2025a-supp.pdf eng https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/impact-of-balance-of-multilingual-exposure-on-gesture-comprehension-in-children-above-preschool-age/05DD4D8642D016EB8D433B964E351B20 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1017/S0142716425100192 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/0142-7164 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess CC BY Applied Psycholinguistics. - Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2025, vol. 46 Bilingualism gesture comprehension multimodal integration non-verbal communication info:eu-repo/classification/udc/616 The impact of balance of multilingual exposure on gesture comprehension in children above preschool age http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501