In this paper we describe how pragmatic constraints of two types of explanatory interactions influence both the organization of syntactic elements in clauses and gestural behavior. We provide evidence on how young children confronted with a dual-goal task including both a referential issue and a social interactional issue start to show competencies that are not present in a single referential task. Further, our intention is to contribute to theoretical issues in pragmatics through a study of how children mobilize pragmatic constraints of language production and also to account for language development within the framework of it being understood as a multimodal phenomenon. Results show that children's linguistic and gesture choices depend on the type of explanation they are giving. While in a process explanation, children perform more referential gestures whereas in instructional explanation, they perform more pragmatic gestures.