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Based on the linguistic analysis of game explanations and retellings, the paper's goal is to investigate the relation of preschool children's situated discourse competence and iconic gestures in different communicative genres, focussing on reinforcing and supplementary speech-gesture-combinations. To this end, a method was developed to evaluate discourse competence as a context-sensitive and interactively embedded phenomenon. The so-called GLOBE-model was adapted to assess discourse competence in relation to interactive scaffolding. The findings show clear links between the children's competence and their parents' scaffolding. We suggest this to be evidence of a fine-tuned interactive support system. The results also indicate strong relations between higher discourse competence and increased frequency of iconic gestures. This applies in particular to reinforcing gestures. The results are interpreted as a confirmation that the speech-gesture system undergoes systematic changes during early childhood, and that gesturing becomes more iconic - and thus more communicative - when discourse competence is growing.
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Lenguaje Infantil , Gestos , Humanos , Preescolar , Masculino , Femenino , Habla , Comunicación , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , LingüísticaRESUMEN
Language comprehension of action verbs recruits embodied representations in the brain that are assumed to invoke a mental simulation (e.g., "grasping a peanut"). This extends to abstract concepts, as well ("grasping an idea"). We, therefore, argue that mental simulation works across levels of abstractness and involves higher-level schematic structures that subsume a generic structure of actions and events.
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Encéfalo , LenguajeRESUMEN
Decontextualized talk is assumed to be used only rarely when children are younger than 30 months. Motivated by Bühler's (1934/1999) linguistic theory that describes different dimensions of (de-)contextualization, we provide evidence that this kind of input can already be found in caregivers' talking to their 12-month-old children. Such early input is characterized by being decontextualized on some dimensions while being grounded in the immediate context on others. In this way, parents may scaffold understanding of talk about the there-and-then. We also examined whether caregivers adapt decontextualized verbal input to individual trajectories in language development. We observed 59 parent-child interactions within a decorated room when children were 12 months old, and assessed the children's linguistic development at 12 and 24 months of age. However, we did not find differences in the input directed toward children with different trajectories in language development.
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Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Relaciones Madre-Hijo , Habla , Cuidadores , Preescolar , Comprensión , Femenino , Humanos , Lactante , Lingüística , Masculino , Relaciones Padres-Hijo , PadresRESUMEN
Early identification of primary language delay is crucial to implement effective prevention programs. Available screening instruments are based on parents' reports and have only insufficient predictive validity. This study employed observational measures of preverbal infants' gestural communication to test its predictive validity for identifying later language delays. Pointing behavior of fifty-nine 12-month-old infants was analyzed and related to their language skills 1 year later. Results confirm predictive validity of preverbal communication for language skills with the hand shape of pointing being superior compared to the underlying motives for pointing (imperative vs. declarative). Twelve-month-olds who pointed only with their open hand but never with their index finger were at risk for primary language delay at 2 years of age.
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Gestos , Trastornos del Desarrollo del Lenguaje/diagnóstico , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Preescolar , Femenino , Estudios de Seguimiento , Humanos , Lactante , MasculinoRESUMEN
Research has shown that infants' language development is influenced by their gaze following-an ability linked to their cognitive and social development. Following social learning approaches, this pilot study explored whether variations in gaze following and later vocabulary scores relate to early mother-infant interactions by focusing on the role of mothers' gaze responsiveness in infants' attentional and language development. We recruited 15 mother-child pairs in Poland and assessed their engagement in joint attention episodes. Results indicate that mothers foster their infants' gaze-following ability by providing them with numerous opportunities to participate in the task. We also confirmed a correlation between infants' gaze-following ability at 6 months and their vocabulary scores at 24 months. However, combining both infants' gaze following and mothers' gaze monitoring as predictors in one model revealed that maternal gaze monitoring was a stronger predictor of infants' later vocabulary growth. Overall, this study emphasizes that mothers' gaze responsiveness is a crucial feature of scaffolding that impacts on infants' gaze following and language development.
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Relaciones Madre-Hijo , Vocabulario , Femenino , Lactante , Humanos , Proyectos Piloto , Relaciones Madre-Hijo/psicología , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , MadresRESUMEN
We trained forty German-speaking children aged 1;8-2;0 in their comprehension of UNTER [UNDER]. The target word was presented within semantically organized input in the form of a 'narrative' to the experimental group and within 'unconnected speech' to the control group. We tested children's learning by asking them to perform an UNDER-relation before, immediately after, and again one day after the training using familiarized and unfamiliarized materials. Compared to controls, the experimental group learned better and retained more. Children with advanced expressive lexicons in particular were aided in generalizing to unfamiliarized materials by the narrative presentation. This study extends our understanding of how narrations scaffold young children's enrichment of nascent word knowledge.
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Aprendizaje , Narración , Vocabulario , Lenguaje Infantil , Preescolar , Femenino , Alemania , Humanos , Lactante , MasculinoRESUMEN
By the age of eight, there is a significant increase in abstract words in the child's lexicon. A crucial contribution can be seen in the linguistic input, i.e. the way how abstract words are presented by caregivers by means of linguistic perspectivation and emotionalization. Following an interactionist way, we were interested in how the semantics of abstract words is constructed by child and caregiver in duet. We focused on a subset of abstract words and studied the acquisition of meaning of the religious concept mercy. We expected religious words to be emotionally anchored and presented with perspectivation, both contributing to learning. Exploring the dialogic constructions, we investigated eight 7- to 8-year olds and their parents during dialogic reading and studied their strategies focusing on the linguistic means of emotionalization and perspectivation in contextualizing the word. In a subsequent test, we analysed these means used by the children and assessed their individual understanding of mercy. Our analyses indicate that during reading, the enrichment of semantics by emotionalization was related between child and caregiver, whereas cross-situationally, a simultaneous enrichment of emotionalization and perspectivation was present. Moreover, the children demonstrated a conceptual understanding of mercy in religious contexts, but not in secular contexts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.
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Aprendizaje , Semántica , Niño , Humanos , LecturaRESUMEN
Explanation has been identified as an important capability for AI-based systems, but research on systematic strategies for achieving understanding in interaction with such systems is still sparse. Negation is a linguistic strategy that is often used in explanations. It creates a contrast space between the affirmed and the negated item that enriches explaining processes with additional contextual information. While negation in human speech has been shown to lead to higher processing costs and worse task performance in terms of recall or action execution when used in isolation, it can decrease processing costs when used in context. So far, it has not been considered as a guiding strategy for explanations in human-robot interaction. We conducted an empirical study to investigate the use of negation as a guiding strategy in explanatory human-robot dialogue, in which a virtual robot explains tasks and possible actions to a human explainee to solve them in terms of gestures on a touchscreen. Our results show that negation vs. affirmation 1) increases processing costs measured as reaction time and 2) increases several aspects of task performance. While there was no significant effect of negation on the number of initially correctly executed gestures, we found a significantly lower number of attempts-measured as breaks in the finger movement data before the correct gesture was carried out-when being instructed through a negation. We further found that the gestures significantly resembled the presented prototype gesture more following an instruction with a negation as opposed to an affirmation. Also, the participants rated the benefit of contrastive vs. affirmative explanations significantly higher. Repeating the instructions decreased the effects of negation, yielding similar processing costs and task performance measures for negation and affirmation after several iterations. We discuss our results with respect to possible effects of negation on linguistic processing of explanations and limitations of our study.
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Pointing, like eye gaze, is a deictic gesture that can be used to orient the attention of another person towards an object or an event. Previous research suggests that infants first begin to follow a pointing gesture between 10 and 13 months of age. We investigated whether sensitivity to pointing could be seen at younger ages employing a technique recently used to show early sensitivity to perceived eye gaze. Three experiments were conducted with 4.5- and 6.5-month-old infants. Our first goal was to examine whether these infants could show a systematic response to pointing by shifting their visual attention in the direction of a pointing gesture when we eliminated the difficulty of disengaging fixation from a pointing hand. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that a dynamic, but not a static, pointing gesture triggers shifts of visual attention in infants as young as 4.5 months of age. Our second goal was to clarify whether this response was based on sensitivity to the directional posture of the pointing hand, the motion of the pointing hand, or both. The results from Experiment 3 suggest that the direction of motion is necessary but not sufficient to orient infants' attention toward a distal target. Infants shifted their attention in the direction of the pointing finger, but only when the hand was moving in the same direction. These results suggest that infants are prepared to orient to the distal referent of a pointing gesture which likely contributes to their learning the communicative function of pointing.
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Atención/fisiología , Movimientos Oculares/fisiología , Mano/fisiología , Percepción Visual/fisiología , Análisis de Varianza , Fijación Ocular/fisiología , Gestos , Humanos , Lactante , Orientación/fisiología , Estimulación LuminosaRESUMEN
Pointing is one of the first conventional means of communication and infants have various motives for engaging in it such as imperative, declarative, or informative. Little is known about the developmental paths of producing and understanding these different motives. In our longitudinal study (N = 58) during the second year of life, we experimentally elicited infants' pointing production and comprehension in various settings and under pragmatically valid conditions. We followed two steps in our analyses and assessed the occurrence of canonical index-finger pointing for different motives and the engagement in an ongoing interaction in pursuit of a joint goal revealed by frequency and multimodal utterances. For understanding the developmental paths, we compared two groups: typically developing infants (TD) and infants who have been assessed as having delayed language development (LD). Results showed that the developmental paths differed according to the various motives. When comparing the two groups, for all motives, LD infants produced index-finger pointing 2 months later than TD infants. For the engagement, although the pattern was less consistent across settings, the frequency of pointing was comparable in both groups, but infants with LD used less canonical forms of pointing and made fewer multimodal contributions than TD children.
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Gestos , Trastornos del Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Niño , Desarrollo Infantil , Humanos , Lactante , Estudios Longitudinales , MotivaciónRESUMEN
One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ways because a learner can be engaged in different activities that foster learning. Up to now, three roles have been proposed when designing these activities for robots: as a teacher or tutor, a learning peer, or a novice. Current research proposes that deciding in favor of one role over another depends on the content or preferred pedagogical form. However, the design of activities changes not only the content of learning, but also the nature of a human-robot social relationship. This is particularly important in language acquisition, which has been recognized as a social endeavor. The following review aims to specify the differences in human-robot social relationships when children learn language through interacting with a social robot. After proposing categories for comparing these different relationships, we review established and more specific, innovative roles that a robot can play in language-learning scenarios. This follows Mead's (1946) theoretical approach proposing that social roles are performed in interactive acts. These acts are crucial for learning, because not only can they shape the social environment of learning but also engage the learner to different degrees. We specify the degree of engagement by referring to Chi's (2009) progression of learning activities that range from active, constructive, toward interactive with the latter fostering deeper learning. Taken together, this approach enables us to compare and evaluate different human-robot social relationships that arise when applying a robot in a particular social role.
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The economic principle of communication, according to which successful communication can be reached by least effort, has been studied for verbal communication. With respect to nonverbal behavior, it implies that forms of iconic gestures change over the course of communication and become reduced in the sense of less pronounced. These changes and their effects on learning are currently unexplored in relevant literature. Addressing this research gap, we conducted a word learning study to test the effects of changing gestures on children's slow mapping. We applied a within-subject design and tested 51 children, aged 6.7 years (SD = 0.4), who learned unknown words from a story. The storyteller acted on the basis of two conditions: In one condition, in which half of the target words were presented, the story presentation was enhanced with progressively reduced iconic gestures (PRG); in the other condition, half of the target words were accompanied by fully executed iconic gestures (FEG). To ensure a reliable gesture presentation, children were exposed to a recorded person telling a story in both conditions. We tested the slow mapping effects on children's productive and receptive word knowledge three minutes as well as two to three days after being presented the story. The results suggest that children's production of the target words, but not their understanding thereof, was enhanced by PRG.
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Temperamental traits can decisively influence how children enter into social interaction with their environment. Yet, in the field of child-robot interaction, little is known about how individual differences such as shyness impact on how children interact with social robots in educational settings. The present study systematically assessed the temperament of 28 preschool children aged 4-5 years in order to investigate the role of shyness within a dyadic child-robot interaction. Over the course of four consecutive sessions, we observed how shy compared to nonshy children interacted with a social robot during a word-learning educational setting and how shyness influenced children's learning outcomes. Overall, results suggested that shy children not only interacted differently with a robot compared to nonshy children, but also changed their behavior over the course of the sessions. Critically, shy children interacted less expressively with the robot in general. With regard to children's language learning outcomes, shy children scored lower on an initial posttest, but were able to close this gap on a later test, resulting in all children retrieving the learned words on a similar level. When intertest learning gain was considered, regression analyses even confirmed a positive predictive role of shyness on language learning gains. Findings are discussed with regard to the role of shyness in educational settings with social robots and the implications for future interaction design.
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Previous studies have found that narrative input conveyed through different media influences the structure and content of children's narrative retellings. Visual, televised narratives appear to elicit richer and more detailed narratives than traditional, orally transmitted storybook media. To extend this prior work and drawing from research on narrative elaboration, the current study's main goal was to identify the core plot component differences (the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a story) between children's retellings of televised versus traditional storybook narratives. However, because children also differ individually in their IQ, we further incorporated this variable into our analysis of children's narrative retellings. For our purpose, a novel coding schema was developed, following and extending the existing narrative elaboration approaches. Participants were 46 typically developing children aged 4-5 years from Germany. The current study incorporated two narrative input conditions to which children were randomly assigned: in the video condition, children watched a non-verbal, visually conveyed, televised story from a DVD; and in the book condition, children read the story with an adult and experienced an orally conveyed version in the form of a book with minimal accompanying pictures. In both conditions, the same story was conveyed. After including IQ as a covariate in our analyses, results show that the children from the video condition gave significantly more elaborated retellings, particularly across the who, what, and where (sub-)components. Differences between the conditions in the component when, how and why did not reach statistical significance. Our findings indicate that different media types entail differential cognitive processing demands of a story, resulting in type-specific memories and narratives. The effect of different medial conditions was significant and persisted when individual differences in cognitive development were considered. Consequences for children's development, education, and interaction with and within today's digital world are discussed.
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Gesture and language development are strongly connected to each other. Two types of gestures in particular are analyzed regarding their role for language acquisition: pointing and iconic gestures. With the present longitudinal study, the predictive values of index-finger pointing at 12 months and the comprehension of iconic gestures at 3;0 years for later language skills in typically developing (TD) children and in children with a language delay (LD) or developmental language disorder (DLD) are examined. Forty-two monolingual German children and their primary caregivers participated in the study and were followed longitudinally from 1;0 to 6;0 years. Within a total of 14 observation sessions, the gestural and language abilities of the children were measured using standardized as well as ad hoc tests, parent questionnaires and semi-natural interactions between the child and their caregivers. At the age of 2;0 years, 10 of the 42 children were identified as having a LD. The ability to point with the extended index finger at 1;0 year is predictive for language skills at 5;0 and 6;0 years. This predictive effect is mediated by the language skills of the children at 3;0 years. The comprehension of iconic gestures at 3;0 years correlates with index-finger pointing at 1;0 year and also with earlier and later language skills. It mediates the predictive value of index-finger pointing at 1;0 year for grammar skills at 5;0 and 6;0 years. Children with LD develop the ability to understand the iconicity in gestures later than TD children and score lower in language tests until the age of 6;0 years. The language differences between these two groups of children persist partially until the age of 5;0 years even when the two children with manifested DLD within the group of children with LD are excluded from analyses. Beyond that age, no differences in the language skills between children with and without a history of LD are found when children with a manifest DLD are excluded. The findings support the assumption of an integrated speech-gesture communication system, which functions similarly in TD children and children with LD or DLD, but with a time delay.
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In word learning, one key accomplishment is the reference, that is, the linking of a word to its referent. According to classical theories, the term reference captures a mental event: A person uses a word to mentally recall a concept of an entity (an object or event) in order to bring it into the mental focus of an interaction. The developmental literature proposes different approaches regarding how children accomplish this link. Although researchers agree that multiple processes (within and across phonological, lexical, and semantic areas) are responsible for word learning, recent research has highlighted the role of saliency and perception as crucial factors in the early phases of word learning. Generally speaking, whereas some approaches to solving the reference problem attribute a greater role to the referent's properties being salient, others emphasize the social context that is needed to select the appropriate referent. In this review, we aim to systematize terminology and propose that the reason why assessments of the impact of saliency on word learning are controversial is that definitions of the term saliency reveal different weightings of the importance that either perceptual or social stimuli have for the learning process. We propose that defining early word learning in terms of paying attention to salient stimuli is too narrow. Instead, we emphasize that a new link between a word and its referent will succeed if a stimulus is relevant for the child.
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In this review, we will focus on the development of deictic pointing gestures. We propose that they are based on infants' sensitivities to human motion. Since both conventionalized gestures and bodily movements can be interpreted as communicative, of special interest to us is how pointing gestures are employed within early social interactions. We push forward the idea of a conventionalization process taking place when the interaction partners guide infants' participation toward joint goals. On their way to deploy pointing gestures and thus to successfully influence the partner for a specific purpose, infants need also to disengage from their own object perception or manipulation. In addition, infants accompany their gestures increasingly with verbal utterances-this form of communication is multimodal and offers the possibility to combine modalities for the purpose of expressing more complex utterances. The multimodal behavior will be picked up by caregivers and extended into linguistically more complex forms. Because of this emerging relationship to language and its social use, gestural behavior in early infancy is a powerful predictor for later language development.
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The present study examines how young children and their caregivers establish reference by jointly developing stable patterns of bodily, perceptual, and interactive coordination. Our longitudinal investigation focuses on two mother-child dyads engaged in picture-book reading and play. The dyads were videotaped at home once every 6 weeks while the children aged from 9 to 24 months. Inspired by conversation analysis and multimodal analysis, our developmental approach builds on the insight that the situated and embodied production of reference is fundamentally an interactive achievement. To examine the acquisition of reference, we developed a descriptive instrument that takes account of not only the dyad's joint accomplishment but also each participant's contributions to it. The instrument is based on the sequential reconstruction of the jobs that both participants have to accomplish jointly in order to achieve reference: establishing visual perception as a relevant resource, constituting a domain of scrutiny, locating a target, and construing the (meaning of the) referent. Methodologically, these jobs serve as a tertium comparationis for the longitudinal comparison of both the adult's as well as the child's contributions to establishing reference. We used this instrument to examine (1) what bodily and verbal resources the participants employed, and (2) how their contributions to accomplishing the jobs changed over time. Findings showed that the acquisition of reference was closely related to the child's increasing ability to recognize, fulfill, and set up conditional relevancies. We conclude that the adult's dynamic and contextualized use of conditional relevancies, recipient design, and observability is a crucial driving force in the acquisition of reference.
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In embodied theories on language, it is widely accepted that experience in acting generates an expectation of this action when hearing the word for it. However, how this expectation emerges during language acquisition is still not well understood. Assuming that the intermodal presentation of information facilitates perception, prior research had suggested that early in infancy, mothers perform their actions in temporal synchrony with language. Further research revealed that this synchrony is a form of multimodal responsive behavior related to the child's later language development. Expanding on these findings, this article explores the relationship between action-language synchrony and the acquisition of verbs. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we analyzed the coordination of verbs and action in mothers' input to six-month-old infants and related these maternal strategies to the infants' later production of verbs. We found that the verbs used by mothers in these early interactions were tightly coordinated with the ongoing action and very frequently responsive to infant actions. It is concluded that use of these multimodal strategies could significantly predict the number of spoken verbs in infants' vocabulary at 24 months.