Gestures are key components of human language, and act as precursors of development in linguistic domains such as lexical (Rowe et al., 2008) and syntactic skills (Ramos-Cabo, et al., 2019). Dual language learners use gestures more often than single language learners for communication in everyday life (Nicoladis et al., 2009), suggesting that gestures could be even more important predictors of multilingual language development. However, so far, research on the links between gesture and linguistic skills has focused on gesture use the early stages of monolingual acquisition. However, dual language learning children often only gain significant exposure to the societal language during the preschool years, and little is known about the roles gestures (in particular, gesture comprehension), play at such later stages of development. The aim of this paper is to compare gesture recognition and its relation with other language skills in single and dual language learners. Given the importance of gestures in multilingual situations (Nicoladis et al., 2009), we expect better gesture recognition skills in dual language learners compared to single language learners, and also stronger associations with lexical and syntactical language skills. For dual language learners, we also hypothesize that gestures correlate more strongly with language skills in their stronger, dominant language. 103 single and 89 dual language learning preschoolers (Age: M(SD) = 50.02(7.61) months) who speak German or French and, for dual language learners, Italian or Turkish participated in a computer-based language game in Switzerland and Germany. In a language-fair gesture recognition task (adapted from Marentette & Nicoladis, 2011), they watched 18 videos of actors performing non-verbal conventional and non-conventional gestures (e.g. eating, walking the dog). After each video, they chose the pictures of object that was related to the action in the video (e.g. dish) among three distractors (e.g. scissors, trousers, book). Children’s language skills were assessed via three tasks per language, testing productive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension. The hypotheses were examined using two (multiple-group) structural equation models using age, sex, non-verbal IQ and maternal education as covariates. Preliminary results do not show higher gesture recognition skills in dual language learners. However, as hypothesized, gesture recognition skills seem to be more strongly related to language skills for dual than for single language learners, and more strongly in the dominant than in the non-dominant language. Our results confirm the great relevance of gesture recognition within language development and underlines its unique relevance for dual language learning.

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