196 research outputs found
Sex Differences in Language First Appear in Gesture
Children differ in how quickly they reach linguistic milestones. Boys typically produce their first multi-word sentences later than girls do. We ask here whether there are sex differences in childrenâs gestures that precede, and presage, these sex differences in speech. To explore this question, we observed 22 girls and 18 boys every 4 months as they progressed from one-word speech to multi-word speech. We found that boys not only produced speech + speech (S+S) combinations (âdrink juiceâ) 3 months later than girls, but they also produced gesture + speech (G+S) combinations expressing the same types of semantic relations (âeatâ + point at cookie) 3 months later than girls. Because G+S combinations are produced earlier than S+S combinations, childrenâs gestures provide the first sign that boys are likely to lag behind girls in the onset of sentence constructions
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Early gesture selectively predicts later language learning
The gestures children produce predict the early stages of spoken language development. Here we ask whether gesture is a global
predictor of language learning, or whether particular gestures predict particular language outcomes. We observed 52 children
interacting with their caregivers at home, and found that gesture use at 18 months
selectively
predicted lexical versus syntactic
skills at 42 months, even with early child speech controlled. Specifically, number of different meanings conveyed in gesture at
18 months predicted vocabulary at 42 months, but number of gesture+speech combinations did not. In contrast, number of
gesture
+
speech combinations, particularly those conveying sentence-like ideas, produced at 18 months predicted sentence
complexity at 42 months, but meanings conveyed in gesture did not. We can thus predict particular milestones in vocabulary
and sentence complexity at age 3 and a half by watching how children move their hands two years earlier
Gesturing with an Injured Brain: How Gesture Helps Children with Early Brain Injury Learn Linguistic Constructions
Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech ? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL â matched to thirty TD children on expressive vocabulary â in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture+speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types ïŹrst in speech-alone. Overall, the gestureâspeech system appears to be a robust feature of language learning for simple â but not complex â sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain
Do Iconic Gestures Pave the Way for Childrenâs Early Verbs?
Children produce a deictic gesture for a particular object (point at dog) approximately 3 months before they produce the verbal label for that object (âdogâ; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gesture thus paves the way for children\u27s early nouns. We ask here whether the same pattern of gesture preceding and predicting speech holds for iconic gestures. In other words, do gestures that depict actions precede and predict early verbs? We observed spontaneous speech and gestures produced by 40 children (22 girls, 18 boys) from age 14 to 34 months. Children produced their first iconic gestures 6 months later than they produced their first verbs. Thus, unlike the onset of deictic gestures, the onset of iconic gestures conveying action meanings followed, rather than preceded, children\u27s first verbs. However, iconic gestures increased in frequency at the same time as verbs did and, at that time, began to convey meanings not yet expressed in speech. Our findings suggest that children can use gesture to expand their repertoire of action meanings, but only after they have begun to acquire the verb system underlying their language
Regularization of word order in the verb phrase differs from the noun phrase:Evidence from an online silent gesture perception paradigm
Prior work has shown a ânaturalâ preference in the Verb Phrase for direct object Nouns to linearly precede the Verb. There is also evidence of a ânaturalâ preference in the Noun Phrase to order Nouns before Adjectives. Given this, we asked how domain-general biases like regularization and language-specific biases like the preference for ânaturalâ orders could jointly contribute to the emergence of these two common word orders cross-linguistically. Using a silent gesture paradigm (in which we presented iconic gestures without speech), we exposed different participants to competing Verb Phrase (NounVerb vs. VerbNoun) and Noun Phrase (NounAdj vs. AdjNoun) word orders at varying frequencies. In Noun Phrase contrast conditions, we found that regularization was greatest when the domain-general bias towards regularization and the linguistic bias to order Nouns before Adjectives were aligned. In Verb Phrase conditions, participants regularized to the same extent regardless of input: They opted for greater regularity, even at the expense of aligning with underlying word order biases. We discuss the implications of our work for understanding the effects of domain-general biases on language
Does Language About Similarity Play a Role in Fostering Similarity Comparison in Children?
Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity comparisons, we observed four children who had not been exposed to usable linguistic input â deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. These children developed gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. Here we ask whether the deaf children used their gestures to comment on similarity relations and, if so, which types of relations they expressed. We found that all four deaf children were able to use their gestures to express similarity comparisons (point to cat + point to tiger) resembling those conveyed by 40 hearing children in early gesture + speech combinations (cat + point to tiger). However, the two groups diverged at later ages. Hearing children, after acquiring the word like, shifted from primarily expressing global similarity (as in cat/tiger) to primarily expressing single-property similarity (as in crayon is brown like my hair). In contrast, the deaf children, lacking an explicit term for similarity, continued to primarily express global similarity. The findings underscore the robustness of similarity comparisons in human communication, but also highlight the importance of conventional terms for comparison as likely contributors to routinely expressing more focused similarity relations
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The Pace of Vocabulary Growth Helps Predict Later Vocabulary Skill
Children vary widely in the rate at which they acquire wordsâsome start slow and speed up, others start fast
and continue at a steady pace. Do early developmental variations of this sort help predict vocabulary skill just
prior to kindergarten entry? This longitudinal study starts by examining important predictors (socioeconomic
status [SES], parent input, child gesture) of vocabulary growth between 14 and 46 months (n = 62) and then
uses growth estimates to predict childrenâs vocabulary at 54 months. Velocity and acceleration in vocabulary
development at 30 months predicted later vocabulary, particularly for children from low-SES backgrounds.
Understanding the pace of early vocabulary growth thus improves our ability to predict school
readiness and may help identify children at risk for starting behind
Unpacking the Ontogeny of Gesture Understanding: How Movement Becomes Meaningful Across Development
Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children\u27s learning, memory, and thinking (e.g., GoldinâMeadow, 2003). However, it remains unknown how children distinguish gestures from other kinds of actions. In this study, 4â to 9âyearâolds (n = 339) and adults (n = 50) described one of three scenes: (a) an actor moving objects, (b) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them), or (c) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants across all ages were equally able to identify actions on objects as goal directed, but the ability to identify emptyâhanded movements as representational actions (i.e., as gestures) increased with age and was influenced by the presence of objects, especially in older children
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Interactivity and thought
A shared tenet of embodied, embedded, situated and distributed cognition is that people make sense of things interactively. They run a simulation, they exchange words, often taking turns to change and steer the flow of interaction; they gesture, they handle or manipulate things, they write, sketch or model. Because the concept of interaction seems intuitive, and the phenomena so pervasive, researchers tend to use the term to do more work than they have time to explain. This symposium explores different ideas about the way interactivity is understood, and how it figures in thought processe
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