.. Videos were captured with a Sony Mini DV GV-D900 and imported using Macintosh OSX and iMovie. Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 was used to cut and export twenty-four 18-sec segments of speech with beat gesture to .avi movie files. As the segments were selected from 2 h of free-flowing speech with gesture, inclusion or exclusion of gesture type could be controlled by cropping. That is, it was possible to eliminate movements that communicated consistent semantic information in the absence of speech by beginning an

18-sec segment Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical after that gesture had occurred. Thus, the gesture in the final stimuli was tightly linked to speech prosody but did not convey semantic information when viewed without the originally co-occurring speech. As the benefits of segregating gesture into strict categories has recently come under scrutiny (McNeill Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 2005), in order to maintain ecological validity, beat gesture (i.e., rhythmic gesture) was not limited to flicks of the hand for the purposes of this study (see Hubbard et al. 2009 for discussion). In

the absence of an established method for determining the direct relationship between speech and gesture timing in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical free-flowing speech, we retained 18-sec segments of rhythmic gesture and speech that did not contain highly iconic gestures. A group of eight viewers (who were not subjects in the study) reported that semantic information could not be discerned by viewing the video segments in the absence of speech. Because the 24 speech segments used in our prior study in adults (Hubbard et al. 2009) varied in complexity, a subset of 12 segments was selected for this study based on appropriateness for a younger audience. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Additionally, one 18-sec segment with a still frame of the speaker’s body and six segments of selleck kinase inhibitor ASL-based movements, consisting of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 65 different signs, were selected. The selected ASL movements were noniconic, and a group of eight viewers (who did not participate in the study) again confirmed that the movements did not elicit semantic information. All participants viewed a total

of 18 videos in a single 6-min 30-sec run. Pseudorandomized video blocks involved six conditions, obtained by crossing tuclazepam movement type (beat gesture, nonsense hand movement, and still frame) by speech (present or absent). The 12 age-appropriate segments of beat gesture and speech were used in the “beat gesture with speech” condition (as originally recorded) and in the “beat gesture without speech” condition (where the audio was removed; see Fig. 3). The six ASL-based segments were used in the “nonsense hand movement without speech” condition (as originally recorded) and in the “nonsense hand movement with speech” condition (where they were paired with speech from the former 12 segments that were originally accompanied by beat gesture).