Seeing iconic gesture promotes first- and second-order verb generalization in preschoolers

This study investigated whether seeing iconic gestures depicting verb referents promotes two types of generalization. We taught 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds novel locomotion verbs. Children who saw iconic manner gestures during training generalized more verbs to novel events (first‐order generalization ) than children who saw interactive gestures (Experiment 1, N = 48; Experiment 2, N = 48) and path‐tracing gestures (Experiment 3, N = 48). Furthermore, immediately (Experiments 1 and 3) and after 1 week (Experiment 2), the iconic manner gesture group outperformed the control groups in subsequent generalization trials with different novel verbs (second‐order generalization ), although all groups saw interactive gestures. Thus, seeing iconic gestures that depict verb referents helps children (a) generalize individual verb meanings to novel events and (b) learn more verbs from the same subcategory

How seeing iconic gestures facilitates action event memory and verb learning in 3-year-old children

People naturally produce iconic gestures when they speak. Iconic gestures that depict people's actions may influence the way children process action events. This dissertation investigates experimentally whether seeing such iconic gestures promotes 3-year-old children's action event memory and verb learning. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and presents an outline of the dissertation. Chapter 2 provides a working de nition of gesture and a literature review on iconicity. Chapter 3 describes the development and norming of a large database that contains stimuli videos of actions events and iconic gestures. Action videos showed actors moving in unusual manners and iconic gestures depicted how the actors moved. Chapter 4 examines whether children remember action events differently when they see iconic gestures while encoding these events. Seeing iconic gestures that depicted how actors moved while encoding action events boosted children's memory of actors and their actions. Specifically, children showed better memory for event aspects that were depicted in gesture. Chapter 5 asks whether prior action knowledge promotes verb learning and whether seeing iconic gestures influences this process. Pre-exposure to unlabeled actions facilitated verb learning when those actions were shown with iconic gestures and when children were shown two actors performing the same actions simultaneously, but children performed better in the iconic-gesture condition. Chapter 6 investigates whether children learn that verbs typically refer to actions from seeing iconic gestures that depict individual verb meanings. Children who were taught verbs with iconic gestures demonstrated such word-category knowledge about verbs in an immediate and delayed novel verb learning task in which different novel verbs were taught without iconic gestures. Chapter 7 discusses theoretical and practical implications of the experimental findings. Iconic gestures are meaningful social cues that help children individuate people's actions, encode and remember complex action events, acquire individual verb meanings, and generate word-category knowledge about verbs

Applying Pattern-based Classification to Sequences of Gestures

This research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-062-23-2002 granted to Sotaro Kita and Antje Meyer. We thank Antje Meyer for allowing the use of the dataset. Our gratitude goes to Farzana Bhaiyat, Christina Chelioti, Dayal Dhiman, Lucy Foulkes, Rachel Furness, Alicia Griffiths, Beatrice Hannah, Sagar Jilka, Johnny King Lau, Valentina Lee, Zeshu Shao, Callie Steadman, and Laura Torney for their help with data collection and coding. We thank Birmingham City University, Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, City College Birmingham, CTC Kingshurst Academy, and University College Birmingham for their participation in our research.Postprin

Prior experience with unlabeled actions facilitates 3-year-old children's verb learning

This study investigated what type of prior experience with unlabeled actions promotes 3-year-old children’s verb learning. We designed a novel verb learning task in which we manipulated prior experience with unlabeled actions and the gesture type children saw with this prior experience. Experiment 1 showed that children (N = 96) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with unlabeled exemplars of the referent actions (“relevant exemplars”), but only if the referent actions were highlighted with iconic gestures during prior experience. Experiment 2 showed that children (N = 48) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with one relevant exemplar and an iconic gesture than with two relevant exemplars (i.e., the same referent action performed by different actors) shown simultaneously. However, children also successfully generalized verbs above chance in the two-relevant-exemplars condition (without the help of iconic gesture). Overall, these findings suggest that prior experience with unlabeled actions is an important first step in children’s verb learning process, provided that children get a cue for focusing on the relevant information (i.e., actions) during prior experience so that they can create stable memory representations of the actions. Such stable action memory representations promote verb learning because they make the actions stand out when children later encounter labeled exemplars of the same actions. Adults can provide top-down cues (e.g., iconic gestures) and bottom-up cues (e.g., simultaneous exemplars) to focus children’s attention on actions; however, iconic gesture is more beneficial for successful verb learning than simultaneous exemplars

Young children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 12 countries

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the frst COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children’s screen time during the frst COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n= 2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 12 countries. Caregivers reported that toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with socio-demographic variables, such as child age and socio-economic status (SES). However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with SES and positively associated with child age, caregiver screen time, and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time

COVID-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition : associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries(from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown

COVID-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition: Associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown