Search

Previous studies have shown that infants and toddlers can learn novel symbols, equally well as gestures or words. In Study 1, we test whether toddlers can learn iconic/arbitrary gestures equally well as arbitrary words for familiar objects. The results showed that the toddlers learned only an iconic gesture for top (i.e., spinning) above chance. In Study 2, we tested whether toddlers could learn iconic/arbitrary gestures as labels of actions equally well as novel words. Indeed, they did learn iconic gestures equally well. These results suggest that toddlers associate iconic gestures with actions performed by objects more readily than objects themselves.

When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether bilinguals, known to experience a higher degree of competition in lexical access, show a different pattern of gesture-speech alignment compared to that of monolinguals. Results revealed no difference in the temporal patterns between gestures and co-semantic speech for the two language groups. Synchronous gestures were significantly more frequent than asynchronous ones; asynchronous gestures both preceded and followed the correlated speech, yet preceding gestures tended to occur more often. A qualitative analysis conducted for asynchronous gestures revealed that they may serve a rhetoric function. We argue that the variability in gesture-speech timing results from speakers' strategic use of gesture.

Monolingual English-speaking preschool children tend to process number gestures as unanalyzed wholes rather than use the one-to-one (finger-to-quantity) correspondence. By school age, however, children can use the one-to-one correspondence. The purpose of the present studies was to test whether children learn one-to-one correspondence through exposure to a variety of finger configurations to convey a single quantity. In Study 1, we compared children with exposure to multiple one-to-one configurations, that is, French-English and German-English bilingual children, to English monolingual children who see consistent representations. As predicted, the bilingual children performed better in interpreting unconventional number gestures. In Study 2, we compared Chinese-English bilingual children who knew arbitrary one-handed Chinese numbers gestures for quantities 6-10 to Chinese-English bilingual children who did not know these gestures, as well as to monolingual English speakers. Chinese-English bilinguals who knew the arbitrary gestures were more likely to interpret unconventional gestures arbitrarily (i.e., influenced by the written and/or Chinese gesture forms). These children did not differ from English monolinguals in the interpretation of unconventional gestures. These results are consistent with the argument that children can become sensitive to the one-to-one correspondence in number gestures with exposure to multiple configurations for the same quantity.

These studies tested two questions about the developmental origins of children's sensitivity to iconicity with regard to number gestures: (1) whether children initially learn number gestures with sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence between fingers and quantities or whether they learn them as unanalyzed symbols; and (2) whether sensitivity to iconicity increases with general cognitive development (as indexed by age) or with experience using fingers for counting. We carried out three experimental studies testing if children generalized the one-to-one correspondence in conventional number gestures to unconventional gestures. In Study 1, children between two and five years of age showed little sensitivity to iconicity, tending to be more accurate with conventional than unconventional gestures. In Study 2, we randomly assigned children to count on their fingers or to count only with words. Children with finger-counting experience did not improve in interpreting unconventional number gestures. In Study 3, we compared age-matched samples of children in school (in France) and children in daycare (in Canada). We found that schooling had little impact on children's interpretation of unconventional gestures. These results suggest that young children initially learn number gestures as unanalyzed Gestalts and only later develop sensitivity to the iconicity available in number gestures.

Previous studies have shown that older children gesture more while telling a story than younger children. This increase in gesture use has been attributed to increased story complexity. In adults, both narrative complexity and imagery predict gesture frequency. In this study, we tested the strength of three predictors of children's gesture use in a narrative context: age, narrative complexity (measured by discourse connectors), and use of imagery (measured by story length). French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking children between 4 and 10 years participated in this study. Including these three groups allows us to test for the generalizability of our results and for cross-linguistic differences in gesture frequency. All the children watched cartoons and retold the story. The results showed that the length of the story was a significant predictor of children's gesture rate while age and discourse connectors were not. There were no differences between language groups. One possible in interpretation of these results is that children's gesture frequency is strongly linked to activation of imagery.

Analyses of elicited pantomime, primarily of English-speaking children, show that preschool-aged children are more likely to symbolically represent an object with gestures depicting an object's form rather than its function. In contrast, anecdotal reports of spontaneous gesture production in younger children suggest that children use multiple representational techniques. This study examined the spontaneous gestures of sixty-four 2-year-old Italian children and English-speaking Canadian children, primarily from middle-class Caucasian families. The Italian children produced twice as many gestures as Canadian children in a picture-naming task but produced a similar range of representational techniques. Two-year-olds were equally likely to produce gestures depicting function as form. These data suggest young children's communicative skills are supported by a symbolic capacity that reflects contextual communicative demands.

Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the English past tense production of Chinese-English bilingual children with a matched sample of French-English bilinguals (5-12 years old). The results showed small but reliable differences in the children's past tense production (e.g., the kinds of errors the children made) that could be attributed to knowledge of the other language. Both groups of children showed equivalent rates of accuracy, suggesting that bilinguals exposed to naturalistic speech acquire the past tense much like monolinguals do, only later and with some effects, most likely morphophonological, from their other language. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures and 1 note.)

This study explores a common assumption made in the cognitive development literature that children will treat gestures as labels for objects. Without doubt, researchers in these experiments intend to use gestures symbolically as labels. The present studies examine whether children interpret these gestures as labels. In Study 1 two-, three-, and four-year olds tested in a training paradigm learned gesture-object pairs for both iconic and arbitrary gestures. Iconic gestures became more accurate with age, while arbitrary gestures did not. Study 2 tested the willingness of children aged 40-60 months to fast map novel nouns, iconic gestures and arbitrary gestures to novel objects. Children used fast mapping to choose objects for novel nouns, but treated gesture as an action associate, looking for an object that could perform the action depicted by the gesture. They were successful with iconic gestures but chose objects randomly for arbitrary gestures and did not fast map. Study 3 tested whether this effect was a result of the framing of the request and found that results did not change regardless of whether the request was framed with a deictic phrase ("this one (gesture)") or an article ("a (gesture)"). Implications for preschool children's understanding of iconicity, and for their default interpretations of gesture are discussed. (Contains 1 table and 6 figures.)

Some researchers have argued that children's earliest symbols are based on their sensorimotor experience and that arbitrary symbol-referent mapping poses a challenge for them. If so, exposure to iconic symbols (such as one-finger-for-one-object manual gestures) might help children in a difficult domain such as number. We assessed 44 preschoolers' processing of number gestures and number words on two tasks: give-a-number and how-many. Children were generally more accurate when mapping number words than number gestures onto a number of toys, suggesting that the iconicity of number gestures does not help children map symbols to numbers. We argue that children learn number gestures as arbitrary symbols and do not take advantage of their iconicity. (Contains 5 figures and 2 tables.)

Previous studies have shown that bilingual adults use more gestures than English monolinguals. Because no study has compared the gestures of bilinguals and monolinguals in both languages, the high gesture rate could be due to transfer from a high gesture language or could result from the use of gesture to aid in linguistic access. In this study we tried to distinguish between those causes by comparing the gesture rate of 10 French-English bilingual preschoolers with both 10 French and 10 English monolinguals. All were between 4 and 6 years of age. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and tell the story back. The results showed the bilingual children gestured more than either group of monolinguals and at the same rate in both French and English. These results suggest that that the bilinguals were not gesturing because they were transferring the high gesture rate from one language to another. We argue that bilinguals might gesture more than monolinguals to help formulate their spoken message.

Type and token frequency have been thought to be important in the acquisition of past tense morphology, particularly in differentiating regular and irregular forms. In this study we tested the role of frequency in two ways: (1) in bilingual children, who typically use and hear either language less often than monolingual children and (2) cross-linguistically: French and English have different patterns of frequency of regular/irregular verbs. Ten French-English bilingual children, 10 French monolingual and 10 English monolingual children between 4 and 6 years watched a cartoon and re-told the story. The results demonstrated that the bilingual children were less accurate than the monolingual children. Their accuracy in both French and English regular and irregular verbs corresponded to frequency in the input language. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that children learn past tense morphemes by analogy with other words in their vocabularies. We propose a developmental sequence based on conservative generalization across a growing set of verbs.

Anecdotal reports provide evidence of so called "hybrid" gesturer whose non-verbal behavior of one language/culture becomes visible in the other. The direction of this gestural transfer seems to occur from a high to a low frequency gesture language. The purpose of this study was therefore to test systematically 1) whether gestural transfer occurs from a high frequency gesture language to a low frequency gesture language, 2) if the frequency of production of some gesture types is more likely to be transferred than others, and 3) whether gestural transfer can also occur bi-directionally. To address these questions, we investigated the use of gestures of English-Spanish bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, and English monolinguals while retelling a cartoon. Our analysis focused on the rate of gestures and the frequency of production of gesture types. There was a significant difference in the overall rate of gestures: both bilingual groups gestured more than monolingual participants. This difference was particularly salient for iconic gestures. In addition, we found that French-English bilinguals used more deictic gestures in their L2. The results suggest that knowledge of a high frequency gesture language affects the gesture rate in a low-frequency gesture language.

Abstract While it is well known that there is a lot of variability in L2, researchers rarely measure the variability in L1 to predict the variability in L2. In this [...]

It is said that conventional gestures for numbers differ by culture. Conventional gestures are thought to imply consistency of form both across and within individuals. The present study tests the consistency of finger gestures of 60 participants of three different cultures and in three different mother tongues in nine different hypothetical scenarios. The first subject of analysis is whether participants differentiate between counting and signaling. The second subject is the consistency of gestures within and between groups. The third is how participants depict the number 1. Result show that most people use the same gestures for counting and signaling. In addition, Germans and English Canadians show relatively low degrees of individual differences whereas French Canadians show relatively high degrees of individual variability. Furthermore, only the Germans use the thumb to indicate the number 1, whereas the two North American cultures use the index finger. The present data suggest that finger gestures of some cultures clearly qualify as conventional gestures whereas others do not. It is suggested that the development of conventional gestures is influenced by cultural exposure, which can even result into the loosening of conventions. Keywords: finger gestures; conventional gestures; culture; language; development

This was a cross-sectional study of storytelling development in French–English bilinguals between four and 10 years in both languages. Measures of both spoken and gestural use were examined as a function of age. The results showed that the children’s spoken narrative abilities were related to age in both languages while their rates of gestures were not. The relationship between gesture use and narrative abilities was, at best, weak. These results suggest that fluent bilinguals develop narrative abilities in both languages simultaneously. We discussed the results of the present study in the light of ongoing research on the developmental relationship between speech and gesture in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]