In this study, two different communicative genres (explanation vs. rport) were elicited in 38German preschool children at the age of 4 years. In one part of the study, explanations of agame were elicited from the child. The game involved spatial movements and figures withvarious geometrical shapes. In a subsequent part, children reported about a puppet and its oddbehaviour to their caregiver. We examined childrens viewpoint in iconic co-speech gesturesand related it to the childrens event structures and linguistic structures that differed in termsof transitivity. Our findings suggest that children do not use viewpoints in a unified waywhich had been reported from studies with adults. In contrast, our results indicate a greatvariability in the ways children use viewpoint in iconic co-speech gesture. We found thatdifferent communicative genres (explanation vs. report) evoke different viewpoints in gesture,due to their different event structure and linguistic structure. During the genre “explanation”,O-VPT gestures occurred more frequently with intransitive utterances, whereas during thegenre “report”, C-VPT gestures occurred more frequently with transitive utterances. Moreover,neither of the events within the communicative genres exclusively evoked one specificviewpoint. | 
