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Note this registration has been withdrawn: The present preregistration involves two independent behavioural experiments that will be conducted with native English adults. These experiments are designed to examine the role of working memory and representational gestures in adult learning of word labels (study 1; preregistered N=150) and word semantics (study 2; preregistered N=90). The experiments' predictions are based on the findings from two recent corpus analyses (Cabiddu et al., 2024; Edwards et al., 2024). These analyses assessed the roles of working memory and representational gestures in label and semantic learning within a naturalistic context. This context involved free dyadic conversations between a person knowledgeable about a set of objects (informal teacher) and a partner who did not known anything about the objects (informal learner). Learning was tested post-conversation, both as label recall (asking the learner to look at a picture of an unknown object and recall its name) and semantic learning (asking learners to describe the unknown objects). The findings indicated that the teacher’s representational gestures accompanying speech were beneficial for learners with low working memory abilities (measured using the N-back test; Jaeggi et al., 2008) in recalling the target word labels. Furthermore, a simple effect of working memory was found for semantic learning, indicating that individuals with higher working memory abilities performed better in the semantic learning task. These findings from the corpus analyses are correlational. The aim of the current preregistered project is to experimentally test the effects of working memory and representational gestures. References Cabiddu, F., Edwards, C., Hill-Payne, H., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2024). What Predicts Adult Word Learning in Naturalistic Interactions? A Corpus Study. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bc403rx Edwards, C., Cabiddu, F., Hill-Payne, H., D’Estalenx, Q., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2024). The impact of speakers’ multimodal behaviours on adults’ learning of semantic information: A corpus-based investigation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qb756nh Jaeggi, S. M., Buschkuehl, M., Jonides, J., & Perrig, W. J. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(19), 6829–6833. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0801268105

This preregistration involves two independent behavioural experiments that will be conducted with native English adults. These experiments are designed to examine the role of working memory and representational gestures in adult learning of word labels (study 1; preregistered N=150) and word semantics (study 2; preregistered N=90). The experiments' predictions are based on the findings from two recent corpus analyses (Cabiddu et al., 2024; Edwards et al., 2024). These analyses assessed the roles of working memory and representational gestures in label and semantic learning within a naturalistic context. This context involved free dyadic conversations between a person knowledgeable about a set of objects (informal teacher) and a partner who did not known anything about the objects (informal learner). Learning was tested post-conversation, both as label recall (asking the learner to look at a picture of an unknown object and recall its name) and semantic learning (asking learners to describe the unknown objects). The findings indicated that the teacher’s representational gestures accompanying speech were beneficial for learners with low working memory abilities (measured using the N-back test; Jaeggi et al., 2008) in recalling the target word labels. Furthermore, a simple effect of working memory was found for semantic learning, indicating that individuals with higher working memory abilities performed better in the semantic learning task. These findings from the corpus analyses are correlational. The aim of the current preregistered project is to experimentally test the effects of working memory and representational gestures. References Cabiddu, F., Edwards, C., Hill-Payne, H., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2024). What Predicts Adult Word Learning in Naturalistic Interactions? A Corpus Study. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bc403rx Edwards, C., Cabiddu, F., Hill-Payne, H., D’Estalenx, Q., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2024). The impact of speakers’ multimodal behaviours on adults’ learning of semantic information: A corpus-based investigation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qb756nh Jaeggi, S. M., Buschkuehl, M., Jonides, J., & Perrig, W. J. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(19), 6829–6833. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0801268105