Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T13:13:05.475Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2019

Whitney GOODRICH SMITH ,
Alexis K. BLACK  and
Carla L. HUDSON KAM
Whitney GOODRICH SMITH
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Canada
Alexis K. BLACK
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Canada
Carla L. HUDSON KAM*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Canada
*
*Corresponding author: 2613 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an ambiguous pronoun, but co-speech gesture clarified the referent. There were two comparison conditions. In the Gender Training condition the characters were different genders, thereby avoiding ambiguity. In the Name Training condition, the first-mentioned name was simply repeated. Ambiguous pronoun interpretation was tested pre- and post-training. Children in the Gesture condition were significantly more likely to interpret ambiguous pronouns as the first-mentioned character after training. Results from the comparison conditions were ambiguous: there was a small but non-significant effect of training, but also no significant differences between conditions.

Keywords

pronoun interpretationprocessing biasestraininggesture
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , May 2019 , pp. 433 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akmajian, A., & Jackendoff, R. (1970). Coreferentiality and stress. Linguistic Inquiry, 1, 124–6.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E. (2001). The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes, 31, 137–62.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E. (2010). How speakers refer: the role of accessibility. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4, 187–203.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E. (2013). What should a theory of pronoun interpretation look like? Commentary on Kehler & Rohde (2013): a probabilistic reconciliation of coherence-driven and centering-driven theories of pronoun interpretation. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 59–73.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 527–65.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eye tracking. Cognition, 76, B13–B26.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1–48.Google Scholar
Botting, N., Riches, N., Gaynor, M., & Morgan, G. (2010). Gesture production and comprehension in children with specific language impairment. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28, 51–69.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., & Tomasello, M. (1999). Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. Developmental Psychology, 35, 29–44.Google Scholar
Capone, N. C., & McGregor, K. K. (2005). The effect of semantic representation on toddlers’ word retrieval. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 1468–80.Google Scholar
Chambers, C. G., & Smyth, R. (1998). Structural parallelism and discourse coherence: a test of centering theory. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 593–608.Google Scholar
Cook, S. W., Duffy, R. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2013). Consolidation and transfer of learning after observing hand gesture. Child Development, 84, 1863–71.Google Scholar
Gernsbacher, M. A., & Hargreaves, D. J. (1988). Accessing sentence participants: the advantage of first mention. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 699–717.Google Scholar
Gernsbacher, M. A., & Hargreaves, D. J. (1992). The privilege of primacy: experimental data and cognitive explanations. In Payne, D. L. (Ed.), Pragmatics of word order flexibility (pp. 83–116). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gómez, R. L., Bootzin, R. R., & Nadel, L. (2006). Naps promote abstraction in language-learning infants. Psychological Science, 17, 670–4.Google Scholar
Goodrich, W. (2009). Gesture as input in language acquisition: Learning ‘who she is’ from ‘where she is’. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Goodrich, W., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2009). Co-speech gesture as input in verb learning. Developmental Science, 12, 81–7.Google Scholar
Goodrich Smith, W., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2012). Knowing ‘who she is’ based on ‘where she is’: the effect of co-speech gesture on pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognition, 4, 75–98.Google Scholar
Goodrich Smith, W., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2015). Children's use of gesture in ambiguous pronoun interpretation. Journal of Child Language, 42, 591–617.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. C, Grosz, B. J., & Gilliom, L. A. (1993). Pronouns, names and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science, 17, 311–47.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, J. K., Nappa, R., & Snedeker, J. (2011). Ambiguous pronouns processing development: probably not U-shaped. In Danis, N., Mesh, K., & Sung, H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 272–82). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, J. K., Nappa, R., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Development of the first-mention bias. Journal of Child Language, 42, 423–46.Google Scholar
Hostetter, A. B. (2011). When do gestures communicate? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 137, 297–315.Google Scholar
Järvikivi, J., van Gompel, R. P., Hyönä, J., & Bertram, R. (2005). Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts. Psychological Science, 16, 260–4.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). Some fundamental aspects of language development after age five. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (Eds.), Language acquisition (pp. 455–74). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. (1976). Towards a universal definition of ‘Subject’. In Li, C. (Ed.), Subject and Topic (pp. 61–77). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kehler, A., & Rohde, H. (2013). A probabilistic reconciliation of coherence-driven and centering-driven theories of pronoun interpretation. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 1–37.Google Scholar
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: visible action as utterance. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kertoy, M. K. (1991). Listening comprehension for sentences: the accessibility of referents for pronouns as a function of age, topic continuity, and pronoun emphasis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 52, 344–53.Google Scholar
Lüke, C., & Ritterfeld, U. (2014). The influence of iconic and arbitrary gestures on novel word learning in children with and without SLI. Gesture, 14, 204–25.Google Scholar
Maquet, P., Peigneux, P., Laureys, S., & Smith, C. (2002). Be caught napping: you're doing more than resting your eyes. Nature Neuroscience, 5, 618–19.Google Scholar
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Megherbi, H., & Ehrlich, M.-C. (2009). The on-line interpretation of pronouns and repeated names in seven-year-old children. Current Psychology Letters: Behaviour, Brain & Cognition, 25(2). Retrieved from <http://cpl.revues.org/4895>..>Google Scholar
Morford, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1992). Comprehension and production of gesture in combination with speech in one-word speakers. Journal of Child Language, 19, 559–80.Google Scholar
Mumford, K. H., & Kita, S. (2014). Children use gesture to interpret novel verb meanings. Child Development, 85, 1181–9.Google Scholar
Nappa, R., & Arnold, J. E. (2014). The road to understanding is paved with the speaker's intentions: cues to the speaker's attention and intentions affect pronoun comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 70, 58–81.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1977). Facilitating children's syntax acquisition. Developmental Psychology, 13, 101–7.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. S., & Frost, L. A. (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition, 26, 195–267.Google Scholar
Pyykkönen, P., & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology, 57, 5–16.Google Scholar
Pyykkönen, P., Matthews, D., & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: a visual world study of pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 115–29.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2017). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Online <https://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
Ramscar, M. (2013). Suffixing, prefixing, and the functional order of regularities in meaningful strings. Psihologija, 46, 377–96.Google Scholar
Ryskin, R. A., Fine, A., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2017). Do listeners learn speaker/accent-specific syntactic biases? Poster presented at the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Ryskin, R. A., Qi, Z., Duff, M., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2017). Syntactic variability between and within speakers: When to adapt, when to generalize? Talk presented at the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Sauermann, A., & Gagarina, N. (2017). Grammatical role parallelism influences ambiguous pronoun resolution in German. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01205Google Scholar
Smith, L. B., Jones, S. S., Landau, B., Gershkoff-Stowe, L., & Samuelson, L. (2002). Object name learning provides on-the-job training for attention. Psychological Science, 13, 13–19.Google Scholar
So, W. C., Coppola, M., Licciardello, V., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). The seeds of spatial grammar in the manual modality. Cognitive Science, 29, 1029–43.Google Scholar
So, W. C., Kita, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2009). Using the hands to identify who does what to whom: gesture and speech go hand-in-hand. Cognitive Science, 33, 115–25.Google Scholar
So, W. C., & Wong, K.-Y. M. (2018). Tracing the development of spatially modulated gestures in the manual modality in nonsigning Chinese-speaking children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(3), 527–44.Google Scholar
Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2005). Who's ‘she’? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 29–57.Google Scholar
Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2007). Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns. Lingua, 117, 1959–87.Google Scholar
Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2005). Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: What is the role of sleep? Trends in Neurosciences, 28, 408–15.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., Brooks, P. J., & Stern, E. (1998). Learning to produce passive utterances through discourse. First Language, 18, 223–37.Google Scholar
Valian, V., & Casey, L. (2003). Young children's acquisition of wh-questions: the role of structured input. Journal of Child Language, 30, 117–43.Google Scholar
Vogt, S., & Kauschke, C. (2017). Observing iconic gestures enhances word learning in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment. Journal of Child Language, 44, 1458–84.Google Scholar
Wakefield, E., Hall, C., James, J., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Gesture of generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects. Developmental Science, 21(5). doi:10.1111/desc.12656Google Scholar
Wells, J. B., Christiansen, M. H., Race, D. S., Acheson, D. J., & MacDonald, M. (2009). Experience and sentence processing: statistical learning and relative clause comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 250–71.Google Scholar
Yeo, A., Ledesma, I., Nathan, M. J., Alibali, M. W., & Church, R. B. (2017). Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes ‘hands off’ is better. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2(41). doi:10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0Google Scholar
Yow, W. Q. (2015). Monolingual and bilingual preschoolers’ use of gestures to interpret ambiguous pronouns. Journal of Child Language, 42, 1394–407.Google Scholar