Abstract
Children can understand iconic co-speech gestures that characterize entities by age 3 (Stanfield et al. in J Child Lang 40(2):1–10, 2014; e.g., “I’m drinking” \(+\) tilting hand in C-shape to mouth as if holding a glass). In this study, we ask whether children understand co-speech gestures that characterize events as early as they do so for entities, and if so, whether their understanding is influenced by the patterns of gesture production in their native language. We examined this question by studying native English speaking 3- to 4 year-old children and adults as they completed an iconic co-speech gesture comprehension task involving motion events across two studies. Our results showed that children understood iconic co-speech gestures about events at age 4, marking comprehension of gestures about events one year later than gestures about entities. Our findings also showed that native gesture production patterns influenced children’s comprehension of gestures characterizing such events, with better comprehension for gestures that follow language-specific patterns compared to the ones that do not follow such patterns—particularly for manner of motion. Overall, these results highlight early emerging abilities in gesture comprehension about motion events.
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Notes
Adults performed significantly above chance in all three conditions: manner \(+\) path contrast, \(t(13) = 17.24\), \(p<\) .001, \(d = 9.56\); manner contrast, \(t(13) = 14.89\), \(p < .001\), \(d = 8.26\); and path contrast, formal statistics could not be conducted due to 100% correct, with no variance. This pattern remained the same for 4-year-olds: manner \(+\) path, \(t(13) = 2.88\), \(p < .05\), \(d = 1.6\); manner contrast, \(t(13) = 2.78\), \(p < .05\), \(d = 1.54\); path contrast, \(t(13) = 1.81\), \(p < .05\), \(d = 1\). On the other hand, 3-year-olds were at chance in all three conditions: manner \(+\) path \(=\) \(t(13) = 1.0\), \(p = .17\); manner contrast \(t(13) = 0.51\), \(p = .31\); path contrast \(t(13) = 0\), \(p = .5\).
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Glasser, M.L., Williamson, R.A. & Özçalışkan, Ş. Do Children Understand Iconic Gestures About Events as Early as Iconic Gestures About Entities?. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 741–754 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9550-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9550-7