To sign or not to sign? The impact of encouraging infants to gesture on infant language and maternal mind-mindedness.

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or "baby sign") on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language development and dyadic interactions were scrutinized to assess mind-mindedness. Infants exposed to gesture did not differ from control conditions on language outcomes; thus, no support was found for previous claims that encouraging gesturing with infants accelerates linguistic development. Microgenetic analysis revealed mothers in the gesture training conditions were more responsive to their infants' nonverbal cues and encouraged more independent action by their infant.

The gestural misinformation effect: skewing eyewitness testimony through gesture.

The susceptibility of eyewitnesses to verbal suggestion has been well documented, although little attention has been paid to the role of nonverbal communication in misinformation. Three experiments are reported; in each, participants watched footage of a crime scene before being questioned about what they had observed. In Experiments 1 and 2, an on-screen interviewer accompanied identically worded questions with gestures that either conveyed accurate information about the scene or conveyed false, misleading information. The misleading gestures significantly influenced recall, and participants' responses were consistent with the gestured information. In Experiment 3, a live interview was conducted, and the gestural misinformation effect was found to be robust; participants were influenced by misleading gestures performed by the interviewer during questioning. These findings provide compelling evidence for the gestural misinformation effect, whereby subtle hand gestures can implant information and distort the testimony of eyewitnesses. The practical and legal implications of these findings are discussed.

Revealing children's implicit spelling representations.

Conceptualizing the underlying representations and cognitive mechanisms of children's spelling development is a key challenge for literacy researchers. Using the Representational Redescription model (Karmiloff-Smith), Critten, Pine and Steffler (2007) demonstrated that the acquisition of phonological and morphological knowledge may be underpinned by increasingly explicit levels of spelling representation. However, their proposal that implicit representations may underlie early 'visually based' spelling remains unresolved. Children (N = 101, aged 4-6 years) were given a recognition task (Critten et al., 2007) and a novel production task, both involving verbal justifications of why spellings are correct/incorrect, strategy use and word pattern similarity. Results for both tasks supported an implicit level of spelling characterized by the ability to correctly recognize/produce words but the inability to explain operational strategies or generalize knowledge. Explicit levels and multiple representations were also in evidence across the two tasks. Implications for cognitive mechanisms underlying spelling development are discussed.

Television alcohol advertising: do children really mean what they say?

Few studies have investigated children's responses to television alcohol advertising. Two separate studies evaluated the appeal of alcohol advertisements on children aged 7-10. An exploratory interview study (N = 17) was carried out to assess children's verbal responses to both alcohol and non-alcohol advertisements and to elicit vocabulary to be used in the second study. Whilst the 7- 8-years-old children were very positive about the alcohol advertisements, older children did not like them, nor did they perceive them to be effective. The second study was designed to assess children's implicit knowledge, in view of developmental theory that knowledge is not always available for verbal report. This study (N = 179) used a simple categorization programme on computer. Using this methodology, children of all ages liked the alcohol advertisements and perceived them as effective. Advertising styles affected popularity with humour, cartoon format or the inclusion of an animal, or character increasing the appeal of an advertisement. The discussion draws attention to the importance of multiple methodologies in eliciting valid and accurate information from children, and to policy matters with regard to alcohol advertising regulation.

The relationship between television advertising, children's viewing and their requests to Father Christmas.

OBJECTIVE: Children's letters to Father Christmas provide an opportunity to use naturalistic methods to investigate the influence of television advertising. METHODS: This study investigates the number of toy requests in the letters of children aged between 6 and 8 (n = 98) in relation to their television viewing and the frequency of product advertisements prior to Christmas. Seventy-six hours of children's television were sampled, containing over 2,500 advertisements for toys. RESULTS: Children's viewing frequency, and a preference for viewing commercial channels, were both related to their requests for advertised goods. Gender effects were also found, with girls requesting more advertised products than boys. CONCLUSION: Exploring the children's explicit understanding of advertising showed that children in this age group are not wholly aware of the advertisers' intent and that, together with their good recall of advertising, this may account for their vulnerability to its persuasive messages.

More gestures than answers: children learning about balance.

This research extends the range of domains within which children's gestures are found to play an important role in learning. The study involves children learning about balance, and the authors locate children's gestures within a relevant model of cognitive development--the representational redescription model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The speech and gestures of children explaining a balance task were examined. Approximately one third of the children expressed one idea in speech and another in gesture. These children made significantly more learning gains than children whose gestures and speech matched. Children's gestures were an indicator, at pretest, of readiness to learn and of cognitive gains. The authors conclude that children's gestures provide crucial insight into their cognitive state and illuminate the process of learning and representational change.

Barbie or Betty? Preschool children's preference for branded products and evidence for gender-linked differences.

Children in the United Kingdom watch more television and are exposed to more advertising than children in any other European country. This article investigates the extent to which preschool children (aged 4-5 years) prefer brands advertised on television. Seventy-five children were interviewed and given a choice task in which they had to select the product, from eight pairs each comprising a branded and nonbranded product, that children of their own age and gender preferred. Products included popular drinks, snacks, toys, breakfast cereals, and sportswear. Nonbranded control products were carefully selected as close perceptual matches for the branded advertised products. Yet, on 68% of occasions, children chose the branded, advertised product in preference to the nonbranded product. This preference was reliably higher for girls (78%) than boys (58%). Gender-linked differences are discussed in relation to socialization theory and to girls' greater verbal ability and emotional sensitivity.

Giving cognition a helping hand: the effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval.

The gestures that accompany speech are more than just arbitrary hand movements or communicative devices. They are simulated actions that can both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. This study measured participants' reaction times for naming degraded images of objects when simultaneously adopting a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent with it, and when not making any hand gesture. A within-subjects design was used, with participants (N= 122) naming 10 objects under each condition. Participants named the objects significantly faster when adopting a congruent gesture than when not gesturing at all. Adopting an incongruent gesture resulted in significantly slower naming times. The findings are discussed in the context of the intrapersonal cognitive and facilitatory effects of gestures and underline the relatedness between language, action, and cognition.

The effects of prohibiting gestures on children's lexical retrieval ability.

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996) sees gestures as functioning more at the level of speech production in helping the speaker to find the right words. The latter hypothesis has not been fully explored with children. In this study children were given a naming task under conditions that allowed and restricted gestures. Children named more words correctly and resolved more 'tip-of-the-tongue' states when allowed to gesture than when not, suggesting that gestures facilitate access to the lexicon in children and are important for speech production as well as conceptualization.

How visual images of chocolate affect the craving and guilt of female dieters.

This study asks whether exposure to images of chocolate induces cravings and guilty feelings in females. A further aim was to examine whether these effects are heightened in the case of dieters. The participants, 85 females, saw a series of enticing media images, either of chocolate or of non-food products. Two thirds of the sample were dieting or had dieted in the past; 15% had been on seven or more diets. After viewing the images all participants completed the Attitudes to Chocolate Questionnaire (ACQ) [Benton, Greenfield, & Morgan (1998). The development of the attitudes to chocolate questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 24(4), 513-520]. The different conditions affected only those who dieted. Dieters had significantly higher ACQ scores after viewing the chocolate images than the non-dieters. It is suggested that dietary restriction increases desire for forbidden foods, in the form of craving, and may induce negative affect such as guilt, anxiety and depression.