Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Children's pronoun resolution often relies on simple heuristics.
• Understanding how children acquire complex linguistic processing biases is crucial for developmental theories.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if young children can learn a structural processing bias for pronoun interpretation through brief, targeted training.
• To determine the effectiveness of co-speech gesture in facilitating this learning.

Main Methods:

• Forty-two five-year-old children participated in a three-day training study.
• The primary condition involved narratives with ambiguous pronouns clarified by co-speech gestures.
• Comparison conditions included gender-distinct characters and name repetition.

Main Results:

• Children in the gesture training condition significantly increased their tendency to resolve ambiguous pronouns to the first-mentioned character post-training.
• Comparison conditions showed ambiguous results with non-significant training effects.

Conclusions:

• Brief exposure to co-speech gestures can effectively teach children a structural processing bias for pronoun resolution.
• This suggests that multimodal input plays a significant role in the acquisition of linguistic processing skills.