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Children's use of gestural and verbal behavior in communicative misunderstandings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

M. Jeanne Wilcox  and
Paula Howse
M. Jeanne Wilcox*
Affiliation:
Kent State University
Paula Howse
Affiliation:
Charlotte Speech and Hearing Center Charlotte, North Carolina
*
M. Jeanne Wilcox, Ph.D., Division of Speech Pathology and Audiology, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242
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Abstract

This inquiry examined strategies used by young children when receiver feedback indicated that their gestural communicative attempts were not understood. The children were grouped according to their vocabulary sizes and number of coding rules for two-word utterances. The results indicated that the children, although capable of semantically equivalent verbal behavior, tended to persist in the use of a gesture when experiencing communicative failure. The gestural persistance was not found to be related to the children's lexical or syntactic abilities. It was concluded that the children may not have realized that a verbal behavior can serve as a replacement or an adjunct to a gestural communication.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 15 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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