Young children’s developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues

Abstract

In three studies, children between 22 and 46 months of age (N =180) had to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice-task. In a between-subjects-design, finding the toy required children to either choose (positive expression) or avoid (negative expression) the indicated target. Study 1 showed that 22-month-olds are better at integrating positive compared to negative facial expressions with pointing gestures. Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development, finding an unexpected, u-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months. Study 3 showed that already 34-month-olds succeeded when pointing was replaced with communicative gaze. Findings show that communicative cues need to be studied in conjunction to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development, and that pointing-beyond indexing-has an affirmative meaning for young children.

Vowels in development

“…Although the reorganization in speech perception has thus far been observed in tasks assessing discrimination of non-native speech sounds that are assimilated to native speech sounds (Maurer & Werker, 2014), we submit that our individual-based analysis also captured this pattern for a salient native contrast. Hence, we argue that the U-shape pattern reveals the underlying process of speech perception, which is in line with other studies that interpret U-shape findings (Bjorklund et al, 1997;Kachel et al, 2020;Pauls et al, 2013;Siegler, 2004 and other references in that issue). The second finding that requires further consideration is related to this first issue of a 'dip' in performance of the 8-month-olds in the native speech contrast.…”

Preschoolers’ relevance inferences in linguistic and non‐linguistic contexts

“…Children learn new words by relating them to the surrounding discourse (Sullivan & Barner, 2016;, take into account listener's knowledge when deciding how to refer to something (Matthews, et al, 2006), and create new linguistic items (e.g., car-smoke for exhaust; Clark, 1993) in order to be understood (see Clark & Matos Amaral, 2010 for review). Outside of the domain of language (e.g., in the pointing, eye gaze, and helping literatures), children make rich inferences about the relationships between how and what a communicator communicates, and the communicator's knowledgestate, mental-state, and abilities (Baldwin, 1993;Bohn et al, 2018;Gergely et al, 2002;Grosse et al, 2010;Kachel et al, 2021;Schulze & Tomasello, 2015;Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995;Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). In the present study, we ask whether the ability to compute pragmatic inferences emerges early, and whether it is restricted to the domain of language.…”

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective

“…These findings are peculiar because these gestures are naturally meaningful in that they either index (pointing) or resemble (iconic gestures) the referent. What is more, human children understand them spontaneously already very early in life [ 91 – 93 ]. Apes also seem to be somewhat sensitive to the natural meaning of these gestures.…”